Front matter (continued 8)

Dr. Nott is in trepidation for the domestic morality of the noble poet; yet some of these amatory sonnets may have been addressed to his betrothed. He has perplexed himself by a formal protest against the perils of Platonic love, but apologises for his hero in the manners of the age. It appears that not only the mistress of Petrarch, but those of Bayard the chevalier “sans reproche,” and Sir Philip Sidney, were married women, with as crystalline reputations as their lovers. Nor should we omit the great friend of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was a staid married man, notwithstanding his romantic passion for Anne Bullen. The courtly imitators of Petrarch had made love fashionable. It is evident that Surrey found nothing so absorbing in his passion, whatever it might be; for whenever called into public employment he ceased to be Petrarch—which Petrarch never could, and possibly for a want of occupation. A small quantity of passion, dexterously meted out, may be ample to inspire an amatorial poet. Neither Surrey nor Petrarch, accomplished lovers and poets, with all their mistress’ coquetry and cruelty, broke their hearts in the tenderness of their ideas, or were consumed by “the perpetual fires” of their imagination.

We have now traced the literary delusion which long veiled the personal history of the Earl of Surrey, and which has duped so many ingenious commentators. The tale affords an additional evidence of that “confusion worse confounded” by truth and fiction, where the names are real, and the incidents fictitious; a fatality which must always accompany “Historical Romances.” The same mischance occurred to “The Cavalier” of De Foe, often published under different titles, suitable to the designs of the editors, and which tale has been repeatedly mistaken for an authentic history written at the time. Under the assumed designation by “a Shropshire Gentleman,” whole passages have been transferred from the Romance into the authentic history of Nichols’s Leicestershire—just as Anthony à Wood had felicitously succeeded in his historical authority of Tom Nash’s “Life of Jack Wilton.”

In the story of Surrey and Wyatt, one circumstance is too precious to be passed over. Wyatt commenced as a writer nearly ten years before Surrey, and his earlier poetic compositions are formed in the old rhythmical school. His manuscripts, which still exist, bear his own strong marks in every line to regulate their cæsura; for our ancient poets, to satisfy the ear, were forced to depend on such artificial contrivances. It was in the strict intercourse of their literary friendship that the elder bard surrendered up the ancient barbarism, and by the revelation of his younger friend, studied an art which he had not himself discovered. Wyatt is an abundant writer; but he has wrought his later versification with great variety, though he has not always smoothed his workmanship with his nail. For many years Wyatt had smothered his native talent, by translation from Spanish and Italian poets, and in his rusty rhythmical measures. He lived to feel the truth of nature, and to practise happier art. Of his amatory poems, many are graceful, most ingenious. The immortal one to his “Lute,” the usual musical instrument of the lover or the poet, as the guitar in Spain, composed with as much happiness as care, is the universal theme of every critic of English poetry.

His defrauded or romantic passion for Anne Bullen often lends to his effusions a deep mysterious interest, when we recollect that the poet alludes to a rival who must have made him tremble as he wrote.

Who list to hunt? I know where is an hind! But as for me alas! I may no more, The vain travail hath wearied me so sore; I am of them that furthest come behind. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain; Graven with diamonds, in letters plain, There is written, her fair neck round about— “Noli me tangere, for Cæsar’s I am, And wild to hold, though I seem tame.”

We perceive Wyatt’s keen perception of character in the last verse, admirably expressive of the playfulness and levity of the thoughtless but susceptible Anne Bullen, which never left her when in the Tower or on the scaffold. The poems of Wyatt accompanied the unhappy queen in her imprisonment; and it was Wyatt’s sister who received her prayer-book with her last smile, for the block before her could not disturb the tenderness of her affections.

Wyatt is an ethical poet, more pregnant with reflection than imagination; he was intimately conversant with the world; and it is to be regretted that our poet has only left three satires, the first Horatian Epistles we possess. These are replete with the urbanity and delicate irony of the Roman, but what was then still unexampled, flowing with the fulness and freedom of the versification of Dryden. Wyatt had much salt, but no gall.

Wyatt excelled Surrey in his practical knowledge of mankind; he had been a sojourner in politic Madrid, and had been employed on active embassies. Surrey could only give the history of his own emotions, affections, and habits; he is the more interesting poet for us; but we admire a great man in Wyatt, one whose perception was not less subtile and acute, because it spread on a far wider surface of life.

Wiat, for so he wrote his name, was a great wit; as, according to the taste of his day, his anagram fully maintained. We are told that he was a nice observer of times, persons, and circumstances, knowing when to speak, and we may add, how to speak. That happened to Wyatt which can be recorded probably of no other wit: three prompt strokes of pleasantry thrown out by him produced three great revolutions—the fall of Wolsey, the seizure of the monastic lands, and the emancipation of England from the papal supremacy. The Wyatts, besides their connexion with Anne Bullen, had all along been hostile to the great Cardinal. One day Wyatt entering the king’s closet, found his majesty much disturbed, and displeased with the minister. Ever quick to his purpose, Wyatt, who always told a story well, now, to put his majesty into good humour, and to keep the Cardinal down in as bad a one, furnished a ludicrous tale of “the curs baiting a butcher’s dog.” The application was obvious to the butcher’s son of Ipswich, and we are told, for the subject but not the tale itself has been indicated, that the whole plan of getting rid of a falling minister was laid down by this address of the wit. It was with the same dexterity, when Wyatt found the king in a passion on the delay of his divorce, that, with a statesmanlike sympathy, appealing to the presumed tendency of the royal conscience, he exclaimed, “Lord! that a man cannot repent him of his sin but by the pope’s leave!” The hint was dropped; the egg of the Reformation was laid, and soon it was hatched! When Henry the Eighth paused at the blow levelled at the whole ponderous machinery of the papal clergy, dreading from such wealth and power a revolution, besides the ungraciousness of the intolerable transfer of all abbey lands to the royal domains, Wyatt had his repartee for his counsel:—“Butter the rooks’ nests!”—that is, divide all these houses and lands with the nobility and gentry.

Wyatt should have been the minister of Henry; we should then have learned if a great wit, where wit was ever relished, could have saved himself under a monarch who dashed down a Wolsey.

Surrey and Wyatt, though often engaged, the one as a statesman, the other as a general, found their most delightful avocation in the intercourse of their studies. Their minds seemed cast in the same mould. They mutually confided their last compositions, and sometimes chose the same subject in the amicable wrestlings of their genius. It was a community of studies and a community of skill; the thoughts of the one flowed into the thoughts of the other, and we frequently discover the verse from one in the poem of the other. Wyatt was the more fortunate man, for he did not live to see himself die in the partner of his fame perishing on a scaffold, and he has received a poet’s immortality from that friend’s noble epitaph. In his epitaph, Surrey dwells on every part of the person of his late companion; he expatiates on the excellences of the head, the face, the hand, the tongue, the eye, and the heart—but these are not fanciful conceits; the solemnity of his thoughts and his deep emotions tell their truth. Wyatt’s was

A head, where Wisdom’s mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain, As on a stithy,4 where some work of fame Was daily wrought.

1 “The Works of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt,” by Dr. Nott, form an important accession to our national literature. If we cannot always agree with the conclusions of our literary antiquary, we must value the variety of his researches, not less profound than extensive.

2 “Tiraboschi,” vol. vii.—Haym’s “Bibliotheca Italiani.” When Conybeare communicated the same information to Dr. Bliss, it must have been derived from Warton.

3 And, strange to add, it is still history! Mr. Godwin, in “The Lives of Necromancers,” details every part of this apocryphal tale! And the Edinburgh reviewer very philosophically, not doubtful of its verity, accounts for all its supernatural magic, and clearly explains the inexplicable!

4 The smith’s forge.

THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES.

Incidents of such an overwhelming nature in political history as are those of the Reformation can have no sudden origin. They are but the consequences of something which has preceded. In our country the suppression of the monasteries and the abbeys had been long prepared; it was not, and it could not have been, the temporary passions, nor the absolute will, of an arbitrary monarch, which by a word could have annihilated an awful power, had not the royal edict been but the echo of many voices. It was attacking but an aged power dissolving in its own corruption, which, blind with pride, looked with complacency on its own unnatural greatness, its political anasarca. Its opulence was an object it could not conceal from its enviers, and its paramount eminence was too heavy a yoke for its rising rivals. This power, in the language of the times, had “covered the land with an Egyptian darkness,” and when appeared the “Godly and learned king,” as the eighth Henry was called, he was saluted as “a Moses who delivered them from the bondage of Pharaoh.” It is not therefore strange that the act which at a single blow annihilated the monastic orders and their “lands and tenements,” was hailed as the most patriotic which had been ever passed by an English sovereign. It made even a tyrannous and jealous monarch, who cut off more heads of men and women than any other on record, popular and extolled even in his latter days.

Henry the Eighth had paused at the blow he was about to level. The plunder was too monstrous even for the hand of an arbitrary monarch. Its division among the nobility and gentry was an expedient which removed the odium from royalty, and invested it with that munificence which dazzled the pride of Henry. In the vast harvest, the king refused the lion’s share, looking for his safer portion in the secure loyalty of the new possessors to whom he transferred this vast and novel wealth.

As the scheme was managed, therefore, it was a compromise or co-partnership of the king and his courtiers. The lands now lie the open prey of the hardy claimant or the sly intriguer; crowds of suppliants wearied the crown to participate in that national spoliation. Every one hastened to urge some former service, or some present necessity, as a colourable plea for obtaining a grant of some of the suppressed lands. A strange custom was then introduced, that of “begging for an estate.” Kneeling to the king, and specifying some particular lands, was found a convenient method to acquire them; and these royal favours were sometimes capriciously and even ludicrously bestowed. Fuller has a pleasant tale concerning one Master Champernoun. One day, observing two or three gentlemen waiting at a door through which the king was to pass, he was inquisitive to learn their suit, which they refused to tell. On the king’s appearance, they threw themselves on their knees, and Champernoun was prompt in joining them, with an implicit faith, says Fuller, that courtiers never ask anything hurtful to themselves. They were begging for an estate. The king granted their petition. On this Champernoun claimed his share of the largesse; they remonstrated that he had never come to beg with them; he appealed to the king, and his brother beggars were fain to allot him the considerable priory of St. Germains, which he sold to the ancestor of the present possessor, the Earl of St. Germains.

The king was prodigal in his grants; for the more he multiplied the receivers of his bounties, the more numerous would be the stanch defenders of their new possessions:1 gratitude was the least of their merits. He counted on their resolution and their courage. The bait was relishing, and there were some, when land-grants became more scarce, whose voracity of reformation attempted to snatch at the lands of the universities, which had certainly gone had not Henry’s love of literature protected their trembling colleges. We have his majesty’s own words, in replying to the suggestion of some hungry courtier:—“Ha! sirrah! I perceive the abbey-lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth on edge, to ask also those colleges. We pulled down sin by defacing the monasteries; but you desire to throw down all goodness by subversion of colleges. I tell you, sir, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than on our universities, which shall maintain our realm when we be dead and rotten. Follow no more this vein; but content yourselves with what you have already, or else seek honest means whereby to increase your worldhoods.”

Lord Cromwell was the chief minister through whose mediation these novel royal grants of houses and lands were distributed. There was evidently no chance of attention from his lordship without the most open and explicit offers of the grossest bribery. The Chancellor Audley, in bargaining with Lord Cromwell for the abbey of St. Osyth, for “some present trouble in this suit,” one day sent twenty pounds, with “my poor hearty good will, during my life.” Perhaps the bribe, though only placed to account, had not its full weight, as the chancellor does not appear, in the present instance, to have possessed himself of this abbey, though, afterwards, with the spoils of two rich monasteries, he built the most magnificent mansion in England, by which he perpetuated his own name in the once-famed Audley-End. Sir Thomas Elyot, in soliciting his lordship’s mediation with the king to reward him with “some convenient portion of the suppressed lands,” found it advisable to offer a conditional promise! “Whatsoever portion of land that I shall attain by the king’s grace, I promise to give to your lordship the first year’s fruits, with my assured and faithful heart and service.” All were offering their hearts and the rest of their lives to Lord Cromwell.

As for the regal dispenser himself, so stupendous was his portion that it became necessary to found a court never heard of before—“The Court of Augmentation,” an expressive designation, indicating its plenary character, with its chancellor and its treasurer, and a long routine of officers, and none too many, “that the king might be justly dealt with,” says Cowell, “the interpreter,” “for all the manors and parks, the colleges and chantries, and the religious houses which the king did not sell or give away;” that is, the selected prey which the royal eagle grasped in his own talons.

We are accustomed to trace the Reformation to Henry the Eighth; but in verity small are the claims of this sovereign on posterity, for through all the multiplied ramifications of superstition, nothing under him was reformed. The other great event of the Reformation—the assumption of the spiritual supremacy—accorded with the national independence from a foreign jurisdiction. The policy was English; but it originated in the private passions of the monarch. Assuredly, had the tiara deigned to nod to the regal solicitor, then had “the Defender of the Faith” only given to the world another edition of his book against Luther.

In the last years of his reign, Henry vacillated in his uncertain reform. Sometimes leaning on one party and sometimes on another; he had lost the vigour of his better days. In his last parliament, though not without some difficulty, both from Protestant and Papist, they had voted for “the augmentation” of the royal revenue, their grant of the chantries. These chantries were the last wrecks of the monastic lands. A single church had often several chantries attached to it. Chantries were endowments of estates by the sinners of that age for the benefit of having eternal masses sung for their departed souls. Henry on this occasion, in his last speech, strongly animadverts on the national disunion; and among his thanks mingles his menaces “to unite them in a more unacceptable way” than the tenderness with which at that moment he addressed them, for their concessions to his “Court of Augmentation.”

It is also evident, by this able and extraordinary speech, that Henry would gladly have revoked his gift to the people of “the Word of God in their mother-tongue,” as his majesty expresses himself.2 He had, indeed, already in part withdrawn the freedom he had granted by restricting it to a few persons, and only to be used on particular occasions. His majesty proceeds—“You lay too much stress on your own expositions and fantastical opinions. In such sublime matters you may easily mistake. This permission of reading the Bible is only designed for private information, not to furnish you with reprimanding phrases and expressions of reproach against priests and preachers. I am extremely sorry to find with how little reverence the Word of God is mentioned; how people squabble about the sense; how it is turned into wretched rhyme, sung and jingled in every alehouse and tavern.” This part of the king’s speech was pointed at the general readers of the Scriptures; but his majesty did not discover any happier union among the clergy themselves, whom he roundly rates:—“I am every day informed that you of the clergy are declaiming against each other in the pulpit; and here your charity and discretion are quite lost in vehemence and satire. Some are too stiff in their old mumpsimus, and others too busy and curious in their new sumpsimus.3 Thus the pulpits are, as it were, batteries against each other; the noise is hostile and ruinous. How can we expect the poor people should live friendly with their neighbours when they have such unhappy precedents of discord and dissension in those that teach them?”

Henry the Eighth rejected the Pope, but surely he died a Romanist. His unwieldy huge form was lifted up from his death-bed that he might prostrate himself, and, in the writer’s language, who, however, was a papist, “bury himself in the earth,” to testify his reverence for “the real presence,” when it was brought before him. His will, which, though it was put aside, was not the less the king’s will, attested his last supplications to “the Virgin Mary, and all her holy company of Heaven.” And he endowed an altar at Windsor, “to be honourably kept up with all things necessary for a daily mass, there to be read perpetually while the world shall endure.” At the same time Henry endowed the poor knights of Windsor, upon condition that they should repeat their eternal masses for his soul. His magnificence was proportionate to his sins; but his perpetual masses, and the world, did not endure together.

With this fact before us, it is not therefore strange that foreign historians should have declared that our Henry the Eighth never designed a Reformation, that he altered nothing; and had only raised a schism which those who contest the papal sovereignty in their civil affairs, as the Gallican Church affected to do, would incline more to approve than to censure.

This monarch has been lauded as a patriot king for the suppression of the monasteries and the national emancipation from the tiara—but patriotism has often covered the most egotistical motives.

1 A fear of the restitution of these abbey-lands to their former uses appears to have prevailed long after their alienation. So late as in the reign of James the First, the founder of Dulwich College, in a dispute respecting the land, observes hypothetically—“If the State should be at any time pleased to returne all abbey lands to their former use, I must lose Dulwich, for which I have paid now 5000l.” At a later revolution, when the bishops’ lands were seized on by the parliamentarians, many obtained those lands at easy rates, or at no rate at all; the greater part reverted, but, if I am not misinformed, there are still descendants of some of these parliamentarians who hold estates without title-deeds.

2 See an abstract from one of his Proclamations in “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii. p. 373.—Ed.

3 This alludes to the well-known story of the old priest, who having blunderingly used mumpsimus for sumpsimus, would never be put right, alleging that “he hated all novelties.”

A CRISIS AND A REACTION. ROBERT CROWLEY.

There is a state of transition in society which we usually call a crisis. A crisis is the most active moment of conflicting principles; the novel must extirpate the ancient, the ancient must eject the novel; the one looks to be continued and the other to be settled; it is a painful state of obstinate resistance, like that of two wrestlers when neither can cast down the other.

Fortunate are the people who have only to pass through a single crisis. But in the wrath of Providence there may be reserved another connecting crisis in the chain of human events, and this we term a reaction, usually accompanied by a retaliation; then comes the hoarded vengeance and the day of retribution on which issues no amnesty. In physics, action and reaction are equal; the reciprocation of any impulse not being greater than the impulse itself. Nature in her operations thus preserves an equilibrium; but the human hatreds and the partial interests which man has contrived for his own misery, can only find that equilibrium when he submits to a toleration. But a toleration is a partition of power, and predominance is the vitality of a party. The Catholic vengeance of Mary in its reaction was out of all proportion greater than the Protestant docility of Edward. Our nation has been more subject to this crisis and this reaction than perhaps any other. The reign of Charles the First was a crisis, that of Charles the Second a reaction; that of James the Second brought on a crisis, and the revolution of 1688 was the consequential reaction. But never have the people suffered more than during the three reigns of Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth; a terrible intolerance disorganized the whole community: the conflict of old and of new creeds; of reciprocal persecutions, and alternate triumphs; of abjurations and recantations; of supple compliers and rabid polemics; and of pugilistic contests of the ejected with the ejectors—rapid scenes at once tragic and ludicrous.

Henry the Eighth died in 1547, and the accession of Elizabeth was in 1558. In this short period of eleven years we were governed by two sovereigns, whose reigns, happily for the English people, were the shortest in our annals.

A new era was opening under the dominion of Henry, for he was a monarch of enlarged views. But the intellectual character of England in its vernacular literature was retarded by the events which occurred in the reigns of the two successors of this sovereign. The nation indeed suffered no longer from the civil wars of the rival Roses; but another war now shook the empire with as merciless a rivalry—it was a universal conflict of opinions and dogmas. The governing powers themselves combated each other; and whether in opposing the Reformer to the Romanist, or in restoring “the papelin” to root out “the gospeller,” in these two mutable reigns, they neutralised or distracted the unhappy people; and while both maintained that they were proffering “the true religion,” religion itself seemed to have lost its eternal truth. Edward with an infirm hand established, what from her short reign Mary, with her barbarous energy, could only imperfectly cast down.

Edward the Sixth, a boy-king, and a puppet-prince, invested with supreme power, acted without any volition of his own. We are prepossessed in his favour by his laborious diary. It is, however, remarkable that no solitary entry made in that book of life, no chance effusion, disturbs the uninterrupted equanimity. Whether the young king signs for the decapitation of his two uncles, or jots down the burning of Joan of Kent, an Arian, and another of a Dutchman, a Socinian, or records how a live goose suspended had its head sliced off by those who run at the ring, they seem equally to be matters of course, and by him were only distinguished by their respective dates. A nation’s hope has always been the flattering painter of every youthful prince who dies immaturely; in the royal youth is lamented the irreparable loss of the future great monarch. But his father had been the most glorious youthful prince who ever adorned a throne; and it would be hard to decide, by the heartless chronicle of Edward, whether such an imperturbable spirit would have closed his life as a Nero or a Titus. This unhappy young prince must have felt the utter misery of his condition, for his was that curse of power, when in its exercise power itself becomes powerless, while its hands must be directed by another’s. Had the reign of Edward the Sixth been prolonged, we should have had a polemical monarch, if we may judge by a collection of texts of Scripture, in proof of the doctrine of justification by faith, which exists in his own handwriting, written in French, and dedicated to his uncle.1

This was a calamitous period for the nation; we derive little consolation when we discover that not more than three centuries ago our ancestors were a semi-barbarous race? We seem to be consulting the annals of some Asiatic dynasty, when we see a royal nephew tranquilly affixing his signature to the death-warrants of his uncles; imprisonment or exile would have been too tender for these state victims; we see one brother attainted by another, and the scaffold finally receiving both; and a Queen of England, in the captivity of the Romish superstition, hailing with a benediction her own autos da fè. What we should have gained had the accomplished prince lived, we cannot conjecture; but what the nation were spared by the death of the melancholy Mary, is not doubtful. Edward and Mary were opposite bigots; and both alike presumed that they were appointed to the work of sanctity; but every reform which requires to be carried on by coercion will long appear ambiguous to the better-tempered. The bigotry as well as the puerile taste of the prince appeared when he composed a comedy or interlude against The Whore of Babylon, and the The False Gods; but the brawls of polemics, at least, are more tolerable than torture and the sacrifice of fire.

It was one of the first evils of the Reformation, that the people were ill prepared to receive their emancipation. All sense of subordination rapidly disappeared in society; even the spell of devotion was dissolved; and the people seemed to consider that, having rid themselves of one spurious mode of religion, there was no longer any religion in the world. “Thus for religion ye keep no religion,” wrote the learned Cheke, in once addressing an armed multitude, who cruelly would not tolerate the Christianity of their neighbours.

An immature reformation is accompanied by certain unavoidable inconveniences. Its first steps are incomprehensible to the thoughtless, and too vague for the considerate, doing what it should not do, and leaving undone what it ought to do, comprehending too much, and omitting many things. A revolutionary reform breaks out with an ebullition of popular feelings; but in escaping from one tyranny, men do not necessarily enter into freedom. The reformer, in abandoning what is known, looks to an uncertain and distant futurity; the anti-reformer appeals to precedent, and clings to what is real—his good is positive, and his evil is not concealed. In the removal of some long-standing evils in civil society, some portion of good goes with them; for many of these served as expedients to supply certain wants, and therefore relatively were or may be beneficial. Even our old prejudices, when scrutinised, often will be found to have struck their roots in the common welfare. The complicate interests of civil society were at first a web woven by strong hands, so that much of the antiquated may retain its soundness, while the gloss of the new may set off but a loose and flimsy texture. These are some of the difficulties of an age of innovation, which may wisely check without stopping the velocity of its movements. The only unerring reformer who partakes not of human infirmities, neither deceived by illusions, nor overcome by prejudices, and whose only wisdom is experience, must be that silent and unceasing worker of the destinies of man—Time!

At the period now before us, the crisis and the reaction were alike remarkable. The people who witnessed in four successive reigns four different systems of religion, mutable with the times, amidst their incertitude were in fact taught a religious scepticism. One of the great innovations in divine service was that of preaching from the pulpit, instead of reading set homilies or other prescribed lessons, by which the Romanists had reduced their whole devotion to a mumbled ritual and a mechanical service—formularies and forms which ceased to operate on the heart, and carried on a religion that was not religious.

The introduction of preaching appears to have been followed by an unhappy effect. Latimer, in the rude simplicity of his style, complains of some that went to church for the benefit of being “lulled into a nap.” There was a still greater grievance in this novel custom of preaching; for from the pulpits the turbulent were rousing the passions of the people, by declaiming against what some termed “the abuses which ought to be put away;” while others, persevering in their old doctrine, were alarming their auditors, for the loss of what had been put away. Pulpit thundered against pulpit; for it was not only the reformer, but the anti-reformer, who were the preachers. The fact was, that by an avaricious policy, “the court of augmentation,” which had to pension the monks of the suppressed houses, filled up the vacant benefices as fast as they occurred, by appointing these annuitants, to curtail the pension-list. The enemy was thus settled in the camp of the reformers. This spirit of division was caught by the rude stage of that day in their comedies or interludes. This inundation of popular clamour was only to be stayed by coercion—by proclamations and orders in council. The Council of State issued their orders, or rather their instructions, how the preachers were to preach, and that none but the licensed should be permitted to ascend into the pulpit. Even Latimer himself was discountenanced for his apostolical freedoms, by inveighing against the gentry, who sent their sons to college, instead of educating them at home for the church. Academical degrees were abrogated as anti-Christian; Greek was heresy; and all human learning was to be vain and useless to “the gospellers.” As the preachers were to be licensed, it came to the turn of the players and the printers not to enact or print their interludes, without a special licence from the privy council; and at length the interludes were actually inhibited for “containing matter relating to sedition;” and this proclamation more particularly specifies those that “play in English.” The Romanists had their interludes as well as the Reformers. Bishop Percy once observed that the excellence of the drama, as every wise man would have it, is to form a supplement to the pulpit,—this literally occurred in the present instance; but the pulpit was itself as disorderly, to use the words of the proclamation, “as any light and fantastical head could list to invent and devise.” Our most skilful delver into dramatic history, amidst his curious masses of disinterments, has brought up this proclamation. We must connect the state of these rude players with these rude preachers; the interludes were nothing more than reflections from the sermons; player and preacher were the same. By connecting these together, we form a juster notion of their purpose than we find in the isolated fact. There was now sedition in religion as well as in politics.

The prevalent fervour scattered its sparks through all the ranks of society, and the thoughts of all were concentrated on the sole object of “the new religion.” The Reformation was the great political topic in the court of Edward the Sixth; discussions in theology were no longer confined to colleges or to the clergy. Our poets, ever creatures of their age, reflecting its temper, and who best tell its story, confined their genius to ballads and interludes, making rough sport for loungers and for the common people; or, in their quieter moods, were devoted to metrical versions from the Scriptures. In a history of our vernacular literature, the introduction of a versified psalter and of psalm-singing forms an incident; as the passion for psalmody itself is a portion of the history of the Reformation. “This infectious frenzy of sacred song,” as Thomas Warton describes what he condemns as puritanic, we adopted from the practice of Calvin, who had introduced psalm-singing into the Geneva discipline, but really had himself borrowed it from the popularity of the first psalms in French metre, by Clement Marot. This natural and fine genius, as a commutation for an irregular life—and he had been imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent—was persuaded by the learned Vatable, the Hebrew Professor, to perform this signal act of penance. The gay novelty charmed the court, and was equally delightful to the people; every one chose the psalm which expressed his own personal feelings or described his own condition, adapted to some favourite air for the instrument or the voice. At the time it could have been little suspected that while Calvin was stripping the religious service of its pageantry, and denuding it even of its decent ceremonies, he would have condescended to anything so human as a tune and a chorus; yet the austere reformer of Geneva showed no deficient knowledge of human nature, when he contrived to make men sing in concert, or carol in the streets, and shorten their work by a song cheerful or sad; for psalms there are for joy or for affliction, effusions for all hours, suitable to all ranks.2

Another incident in which our vernacular literature was remotely connected, was the calling in of the ancient Rituals, Missals, and other books of the Latin service, and establishing the book of Common Prayer in the common language. But the people at large seemed reluctant to alter their antiquated customs, which habit had long endeared to them. While they had listened to an unintelligible Mass, they had, from their childhood, contracted a spirit of devotion. Their fathers had bowed to the Mass as a holy office from time immemorial; and from their childhood they had attached to it those emotions of holiness which were not the less so by their erroneous association of ideas. When their religion became a mere Act of Parliament, and their prayers were in plain English, all appeared an affair of yesterday. The church service seemed no longer venerable, the new priesthood no longer apostolical; and the giddy populace protested against the common dues exacted by their neighbour the curate, for their marriages and baptisms and funerals. They forsook their churches, and even refused to pay tithes.

It is in revolutionary periods that we find men adapted for these rare occasions; who, had they not lived amid the commotions around them, had probably not emerged out of the sphere of their neighbours. Such minds quickly sympathise with popular grievances and popular clamours, and obtain their reformation, often at the sacrifice of their individual interest, as if the cause were their appointed vocation. They are advocates who plead, imbued even by all the prejudices of their clients; they are organs resounding the fulness of the passions around them: a character of this order is the true representative of the multitude; and we listen to all their cries in the single voice of such a man.

And such a man was Robert Crowley, a universal reformer through Church and State; whose unwearied industry run the pace of his zeal; whose declarations were as open as his designs were definite; and whose resolved spirit pursued its object in every variable form which his imagination could invent, and which incessant toil never found irksome.

Crowley had been a student at Magdalen College at Oxford, and obtained a fellowship. At the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, Crowley appears to have sojourned in “the great city;” and in that of Edward the Sixth, we must not be surprised to discover the Fellow of Magdalen established as a printer and bookseller, and moreover combining the elevated characters of poet and preacher. How it happened that a man of letters, and not undistinguished by his genius, adopted a mechanical profession, we may account for from the exigencies of the time. Possibly Crowley’s fellowship was what Swift once called “a beggarly fettleship.” In the hurried reform of the day, “the universal good” was attended by “a great partial evil.” In the dissolution of the abbeys and priories they had also demolished those useful exhibitions proceeding from them, by which poor students were maintained at the universities. Many, thus deprived of the means of existence at college, were compelled to forsake their Alma-Mater and seek another course of life. It was probably this incident which had thrown this learned man among the people. How Crowley contrived to fulfil his fourfold office of printer, bookseller, poet, and preacher, with eminent success, the scanty notices of his life disappoint our curiosity. We would gladly enter into the recesses of this man’s arduous life. Did he partition the hours of his day? What habits harmonised such clashing pursuits? Was he a sage whose wisdom none of his followers have gathered? Was the shop of the studious man haunted by learned customers? When we think of the printer’s press and the bookseller’s counter, we are disposed to inquire, Where mused the poet, and where stood the preacher?

Crowley is the author of many controversial pieces, and some satirical poems reflecting the manners and the passions of his day, all which enjoyed repeated editions. But he was not less a favourite sermoniser. He touched a tremulous chord in the hearts of the people, and his opinions found an echo in their breasts. The pulpit and the press, perhaps, had been his voluntary choice, to print out what he had spoken ere it perished, or offer a supplement to a sermon in some awful tome of theology and reform. His Pulpit and his Press!—“those two prolific sources of faction,” exclaimed Thomas Warton.

As a printer and book-vendor, Crowley is distinguished by that curiosity of research which led him to be the first publisher of “The Visions of Piers Ploughman,” which had hitherto slept in the dust of its manuscript state. Warton restricts the merit of his discovery merely to the fervour of a controversialist eager to propagate his own opinions; and truly the bold spirit of reform, and the satirical strokes on the ecclesiastics of the times of Edward the Third, in that remarkable and unknown author, were in unison with a Reformer in the age of Reformation. It must be confessed that the historian of our poetry cherished some collegiate prejudices, and that his native good humour is liable to change when his pen scourges a puritan and a predestinarian, as was Robert Crowley. But Warton wrote when he imagined that the suppressed absurdities of Popery required no longer any strong satire from a Calvinist; and as Crowley, too, lived to hold many dignities in the reign of Elizabeth, Crowley appeared to Warton to be the member of “a Church whose doctrines and polity his undiscerning zeal had a tendency to destroy.” Strype has only ventured to describe Crowley as “an earnest professor of religion.” The meek curate of Low-Leyton could not rise to the magisterial indignation of one of the “heads of houses,” one who, at least, ought to have been, and who, I understand, probably missed the honour and the profit by his own ingenuous carelessness.

One of the most striking productions of this earnest Reformer, for its freedom, was his address to the assembled Parliament. The title is expressive—“An Information and Petition against the Oppressors of the Commoners of this Realm. Compiled and imprinted for this only purpose, that among them that have to do in the Parliament, some godly-minded men may hereat take occasion to speak more in the matter than the author was able to write.” Crowley too modestly alludes to any deficiencies of his own; his “information” is ample, and doubtless conveyed to the ear of those “who had to do in the Parliament,” what must have startled the oldest senator.

Who are “the oppressors of the poor commoners?” All the orders in society! the clergy—the laity—and, above all, “the Possessioners!”

This term, “the Possessioners,” was a popular circulating coinage struck in the Mint of our reformer—and probably included much more than meets our ear. Every land-owner, every proprietor, was a “Possessioner.” Whether in an orderly primitive commonwealth there should be any “Possessioners,” might be a debateable point in a parliament composed of “the poor Commons” themselves, with our Robin for their speaker. But however this might be, “the Possessioners of this realm,” as he calls them, “could only be reformed by God working in their hearts, as he did in the primitive church, when the Possessioners were contented and very willing to sell their possessions, and give the price thereof to be common to all the faithful believers.” This seems perfectly intelligible, but our reformer judged it required some explanation—as thus:—“He would not have any to take him as though he went about to make all things common.” Doubtless, there were some propagators of this new revelation of a primitive Christian community, and as little doubt that Robin himself was one; for he adds, “If the Possessioners know how they ought to bestow their possessions,” and he had already instructed them, in that case “he doubted not it should not need to have all things made common.” Such was the logic of this primitive radical reformer. A bland compromise, and a sturdy menace! This “grievance” of the “Possessioners” might be reformed, till poverty itself became a test of patriotism. They had yet to learn that to impoverish the rich is not to enrich the poor.

At that day they were bewildered in their notions of property, and their standards of value; they had neither discovered the sources nor the progress of the wealth of a nation. They murmured at importation, for which they seemed to pay the penalties, and looked on exportation as a conveyance of the national property to the foreigner. They fixed the prices at which all consumable articles were to be sold; the farmer’s garner was inspected; the landlords who became graziers were denounced; forestallers and regraters haunted the privy councils of the king; the markets were never better supplied; and the people wondered why every article was dearer. About this time the prices of all commodities, both in France and England, had gradually risen. The enterprise of commerce was probably working on larger capitals. As expenses increased, the landlords held that they were entitled to higher rents. In Crowley’s denunciations, “God’s plague” is invoked against all “lease-mongers, pilling and polling the poor commoner.” The Parliament of Henry the Eighth had legalized the interest of money at ten per cent.; Robin would have this “sinful act” repealed: loans should be gratuitous by the admonition in Luke, “Do ye lend, looking for no gain thereof.” In this manner he applies the text against usury. They seemed to have no notion that he who bought ever intended to sell. This rude political economist proposed that all property should be kept stationary. No one should have a better portion than he was born to. Where then was to be found the portion of “the poor commoner” not born to any? or him whose loss of fortune was to be repaired by industry and enterprise? Prices advanced; double rents! double tithes! Our radical preacher attacks his brother ecclesiastics. “We can neither come into the world, nor remain in it, nor go out of it, but they must have a fleece! Let it be lawful to perform all their ministries by ourselves; we can lay an honest man in his grave without a set of carrion-crows scenting their prey.” The splendour of the ancient landed aristocracy and the prodigal luxury of the ecclesiastics more forcibly struck their minds than those silent arts of enlarged traffic which were perpetuating the wealth of the nation, and producing its concomitant evils.

While the people were thus agitated, divided, and distracted, the same state of disorder was shaking the more intelligent classes of society. Our mutable governments during four successive reigns gave rise to incidents which had not occurred in the annals of any other people. With the higher orders it was not only a conflict of the old and the new religions; public disputations were frequent, creeds were yet to be drawn from school-divinity, the artificial logic of syllogisms and metaphysical disputations held before mixed audiences, where the appellant, when his memory or his acumen failed him, was disconcerted by the respondent; but when the secular arm was called in, alternately as each faction predominated, and the lives and properties of men were to be the result of these opinions, then men knew not what to think, nor how to act. What had served as argument and axiom within a few years, a state proclamation condemned as false and erroneous. A dereliction of principle spread as the general infection of the times, and in despair many became utterly indifferent to the event of affairs to which they could apply no other remedy than to fall in with the new course, whatever that might be.

The history of the universities exhibits this mutable picture of the nation. There were learned doctors who, under Henry the Eighth, abjured their papacy—under Edward vacillated, not knowing which side to lean on—under Mary recanted—and under Elizabeth again abjured. Many an apostate on both sides seemed converted into zealous penitents; persecutors of the friends with whom they had consorted, and deniers of the very opinions which they had so earnestly propagated. The facility with which some illustrious names are recorded to have given way to the pressure of events seems almost incredible; but, for the honour of human nature, on either side there were some who were neither so tractable nor so infirm.

The heads of houses stood for antiquity, with all its sacred rust of time; they looked on reform with a suspicious eye, while every man in his place marked his eager ejector on the watch. Under Edward the Sixth, Dr. Richard Smith, a potent scholastic, stood forth the stern advocate of the ancient order of things. However, to preserve his professorship, this doctor recanted of “his popish errors;” shortly afterwards he declared that it was no recantation, but a retractation signifying nothing: to make the doctor somewhat more intelligible, and a rumour spreading that “Dr. Smith was treading in his old steps,” he was again enforced to read his recantation, with an acknowledgment that “his distinction was frivolous, both terms signifying the same thing.” He did not recant the professorship till Cranmer invited Peter Martyr from Germany to the chair of the disguised Romanist. The political Jesuit attended even the lectures of his obtrusive rival, took notes with a fair countenance, till suddenly burst the latent explosion. An armed party menaced the life of Peter Martyr, and a theological challenge was sent from the late professor to hold a disputation on “the real presence.” Peter Martyr protested against the barbarous and ambiguous terms of the scholastic logic, and would only consent to explain the mystery of the sacrament by the terms of carnaliter and corporaliter; for the Scriptures, in describing the Supper, mention the flesh and the body, not the matter and substance. He would, however, indulge them to accept the terms of realiter and substantialiter.

There was “a great hubbub” at Oxford on this most eventful issue. The popish party and the reformers were alike hurried and busied; books and arguments were heaped together; the meanest citizen took his stand. The reforming visitors of Edward arrived; all met, all but Dr. Smith, who had flown to Scotland, on his way to Louvain. However, he had left his able deputies, who were deep in the lore in which it appears Peter Martyr required frequent aid to get on. Both the adverse parties triumphed; that is usual in these logomachies; but the Romanists account for the success of the Reformed by the circumstance that their judges were Reformers.

Such abstruse subjects connected with religious associations, and maintained or refuted by the triumph or the levity of some haughty polemic, produced the most irreverent feelings among the vulgar. As the Reformation was then to be predominant, the common talk of the populace was diversified by rhymes and ballads; and it was held, at least by the wits, that there was “no real presence,” since Dr. Smith had not dared to show himself. The papistical sacrament was familiarly called “Jack in the Box,” “Worm’s meat,” and other ludicrous terms, one of which has descended to us in the term which jugglers use of hocus pocus. This familiar phrase, Anthony Wood informs us, originated in derision of the words, “Hoc est corpus,” slovenly pronounced by the mumbling priest in delivering the emblem as a reality. As opprobrious words with the populace indicate their furious acts, scandalous scenes soon followed. The censers were snatched from the hands of the officiating priests; mass-books were flung at their heads; all red-lettered and illuminated volumes were chopped in pieces by hatchets: nor was this done always by the populace, but by students, who in their youth and their reform knew of no better means to testify their new loyalty to the visitors of Edward. One of the more ludicrous scenes among so many shameful ones, was a funereal exhibition of the schoolmen. Peter Lombard, “the master of sentences,” accompanied by Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, carried on biers, were tumbled into bonfires!

Five years after these memorable scenes, the same drama was to be repeated, performed by a different company of actors. Religion assumed a new face; that which had hardly been established was blasted by the name of heresy. All who had flourished under Edward were now called in question. The ancient tenants now ejected the newcomers, and affronted them by the same means they had themselves been affronted. No one at first knew how affairs were to turn out; some still clung to the reform; others were reverting to the old system. There were in fact for some time two religions at once in the university. The Common Prayer-book in English was, however, but faintly read, while the Mass was loudly chanted. Jewel’s letter to the Queen was cautiously worded. This zealous reformer, in an unhappy moment, had yielded to his fears, and subscribed a recantation, which he soon after abjured before a Protestant congregation in Germany. When Peter Martyr heard the little bell ring to Mass, he sighed, and said, “that bell would destroy all the sound doctrine in the college.” Gardiner gave him a safe-conduct homewards, which saved Peter Martyr from the insolent triumph of his rival, the scholastic Dr. Smith, and the Spanish friars with whom Mary supplied his place.

But the Marians also burned books, as likewise men!

The funeral of the schoolmen carried on their biers was too recent to be forgotten; and in return, all Bibles in English, and all the commentators on the Bible in the vernacular idiom, and which, we are told, “for their number seemed almost infinite,” were thrown together in the market-place; and the lighted pyre proclaimed to Oxford the ominous flames of superstition, which consumed, not long after, opposite to Baliol College, the great unfortunate victims of reformation. There Latimer and Ridley bowed their spirits in the fires, while Cranmer, from the top of the Bocardo, witnessed the immolation, praying to God to strengthen them, and felt in anticipation his own coming fate. Then followed expulsions and emigrations. We have a long list of names. Five years afterwards, such was the rapid change of scenery, these fugitives returned to re-possess themselves of their seats, and were again and finally the ejectors under Elizabeth.

The history of this mutable period is remarkably shown in the singular incident of Catherine, the wife of Peter Martyr, and St. Frideswide.

Peter Martyr, when celibacy was the indispensable virtue of an ecclesiastic, brought his wife into his college, and also his bawling children. This spirit of reform was an abhorrence to the conscience and the quiet of the monks. A brothel, a prostitute, and a race of bastards, formed, according to the old inmates, the residence of the family of the reformer. The wife of Martyr died, and was interred near the relics of St. Frideswide. In the Marian days, it was resolved that the departed female should be condemned for heresy, and, since the corpse lay not distant from “that religious virgin, St. Frideswide,” it should be disinterred; and the Dean of Christ Church had the remains of Martyr’s wife dug up and buried in the dunghill of his stable. Five years after, when Elizabeth reigned, the fate of the disturbed bones of the wife of Martyr was recollected, and, by command, with patience and ingenuity, the sub-dean collected from the dunghill the bones which time had disjointed, and placed them in a coffin in the cathedral till they should be reburied with greater solemnity. A search was at the same time made by the sub-dean for the bones of St. Frideswide, which were not found where they had reposed for centuries. They had been hidden by some relic-adoring Catholic, to save them from the profane hands of the triumphant heretics of Edward the Sixth. In the obscurest part of the church, after much seeking, two silken bags were discovered, which had carefully preserved the relics of St. Frideswide. The sub-dean, who seems to have been at once a Romanist and a Reformer, considered that these bones of Peter Martyr’s wife and the female saint should receive equal honours. He put them in the same coffin, and they were re-interred together. This incident provoked some scoffs from the witless, and some grave comments from those who stood more in awe of the corpse of the saint than of the sinner. Thus they were buried and coupled together; and a scholar, whether a divine or a philosopher his ambiguous style will not assure us, inscribed this epitaph:—

Hic jacet Religio cum Superstitione.

Did the profound writer insinuate a wish that in one grave should lie mingled together Religion with Superstition? or that they are still as inseparable as the bones of the wife of Peter Martyr with the bones of St. Frideswide? Or did he mean nothing more than the idle antithesis of a scholar’s pen?

At this uncertain crisis of the alliance between Church and State, the history of our English Bible exhibits a singular picture of the Church, which, from courting the favour of the great, gradually grew into its own strength, and rested on its own independence. We perceive it first attracting the royal eye, and afterwards securing the patronage of ministers. This phenomenon is observable in the Bible commanded to be printed by Edward the Sixth. There we view his majesty’s portrait printed and illumined in red. Under Elizabeth, in the same Bible, omitting only the Papistic fish-days, we are surprised by the two portraits of the Earl of Leicester, placed before the Book of Joshua, and Cecil Lord Burleigh, adorning the Psalms. This is the first edition of the Bishops’ Bible. But subsequently, in 1574, we discover that the portraits of the royal favourites are both withdrawn, and a map of the Holy Land substituted, while the arms of Archbishop Parker seem to have been let into the vacancy which Lord Burleigh erst so gloriously occupied. The map of the Holy Land unquestionably is more appropriate than the portraits of the two statesmen; but the arms of the archbishop introduced into the Scriptures indicate a more egotistic spirit in the good prelate than, perhaps, becomes the saintly humility of the pastor. The whole is an exhibition of that worldliness which in its first weakness is uncertain of the favour of the higher powers, but which cannot conceal its triumph in its full-grown strength; the great ecclesiastic, no longer collecting portraits of ministers, stamps his own arms on the sacred volume, to ratify his own power!

1 It will be found in the additional manuscripts at the British Museum.

2 See an article on Psalms in vol. ii. of “Curiosities of Literature.”—Ed.

PRIMITIVE DRAMAS.

Scriptural dramas, composed by the ecclesiastics, furnished the nations of Europe with the only drama they possessed during many centuries. Voltaire ingeniously suggested, that Gregory of Nazianzen, to wean the Christians of Constantinople from the dramas of Greece and Rome, composed sacred dramas; The Passion of Christ afforded one of the deepest interest. This remarkable transition might have occurred to this father of the Church, from the circumstance that the ancient Greek tragedy had originally formed a religious spectacle; and the choruses were turned into Christian hymns. Warton considered this fact as a new discovery in the obscure annals of the earliest drama.1 The temples of the idols were for ever to be closed, for true religion and triumphant faith could show the miraculous Being who, blending the celestial with the human nature, was no longer the empty fable of the poet. The gross simplicity of the inventors, and the undisturbed faith of the people, perceived nothing profane in the representation of an awful mystery by a familiar play. Christian or Pagan, the populace remains the same, and must be amused; the invention of scriptural plays would keep alive their religious faith, and sacred dramas would be a happy substitute for those of which they were denied evermore to be spectators.

This attempt to christianise the drama did not produce an immediate effect; but the Roman dramatic art could not fail to degenerate with the Roman empire; and the actors themselves were but the descendants of the mimi, a race of infamous buffoons, objects of the horror and the excommunication of the primitive fathers.2

In the obscurity of the medieval period, the origin of these sacred dramas in Europe is lost. They are only incidentally noticed by those who had yet no notions of the drama. But though in England their remains are found at a much earlier period than in any other country, this seems to have been a mere accident from the utter neglect, or rather ignorance, of other nations of the origin of their own early drama; for these scriptural plays, judging by those which we possess, seem struck in the same mint, and are worked out of a common stock, and their appearance we can hardly doubt was coeval. Monks were the writers or inventors, and a general communication was kept up with Rome throughout every European realm. The subjects and the personages of these biblical dramas are treated with the same inartificial arrangement, and when translated it would be difficult to distinguish between a French, a Flemish, or an English mystery; and in their progressive state, branching out into three distinct classes, they passed in all countries through the same mutations.

It has been conjectured that they were first introduced into Italy, from its intercourse with the metropolis of the Greek Empire; but when we have recourse to its literary recorder, we gather nothing but ambiguity. Tiraboschi is dubious whether the early Italian mysteries exhibited in the year 1264 were anything more than a dumb show, or the processional display of a religious pageant. Decided, on system, not to approve of such familiar exhibitions of sacred themes, the Jesuit has cautiously noticed two companies who evidently had performed a mystery, or miracle-play. In that piece there is a direction that “An angel and the virgin sing;” but our learned Jesuit will not venture even to surmise that “the virgin and the angel” acted their parts, but merely chanted a poem.3 The literary antiquary Signorelli inclines to fix the uncertain date of the first sacred drama so late as in 1445.4 In France these early scriptural exhibitions were so little comprehended, that Le Grand D’Aussy, in his pretension that his nation possessed the drama in the thirteenth century, derives the origin of their mysteries from such pieces as the three fabliaux which he has given, as the earliest dramas.5 So little conversant in his day—not a distant one—were the French antiquaries with a subject which has of late become familiar to their tastes. We learn nothing positive of their “Mysteries” till their “Confraerie de la Passion” was incorporated in 1402.

The earliest of these representations necessarily would be in Latin,6 and performed in monasteries by the ecclesiastics themselves, on festival days; in this state, how could they have been designed for the people? Aware of this difficulty, and convinced that these holy plays were in their origin intended for popular instruction and recreation, it has been conjectured that the Latin mystery was accompanied by a pantomimic show, for the benefit of the people; but an impatient concourse could be little affected by the action of the performers, almost as incomprehensible as the language was unintelligible. The people, a great animal only to be fondled in one way, as usual, worked out their own wants; they taught learned clerks the only method by which they were to be amused, by having the same thing after their own fashion, and to be comprehended in their own language; and the day at last arrived when even the people themselves would be actors. In the obscurity of the medieval period, the literary antiquary has often to feel his way in the darkness, till among uncertain things he fancies that he grasps the palpable. We are not furnished with precise dates, but some natural circumstances may account for the introduction of the mysteries in the vernacular idiom. About the eighth century, merchants carried on their trades in the great fairs, and to attract the people together, jugglers, minstrels, and buffoons were well paid, and the populace flocked. Such a multitudinous concourse appears to have created alarm among their great lords; and the ecclesiastics in vain proscribed these licentious revelries. It would be nothing more than a stroke of their accustomed policy if we imagine that, seeing the people were eager after such public entertainments, the monks should take them into their own hands; and offering a far more imposing exhibition than even the tricks of jugglers, combining piety with merriment, at once awe and delight the people by their scriptural histories and the legends of saints, in the language common to them all, thus enticing them from profane mummeries. It was a revolution in the history of the people, who, without education, seemed to grow learned in the mysteries and to be witnesses of miracles!

This account is not incongruous with another probably not less true, and which indeed has been received as indisputable among the more ancient literary historians of France, and is well known by the verses of Boileau in his “Art of Poetry.” Palmers and Pilgrims—the one returning from the East, bearing in their caps the hallowed palm-branch of Palestine, and the other from some distant shrine, their chaplets and cloaks covered with the many-coloured scallops—taking their stand in thoroughfares, and leaning on their staffs, while their pendent relics and images attracted the gazer, would win an audience from among the people. These venerable itinerants or semi-saints recited their sacred narratives in verse or even in prose; they had sojourned amid “the holy places,” which they described; they had their adventures to tell, serious or comic; and that many of these have entered into the great body of Romance, and were caught up by the Trouvères, we can easily imagine. These strollers excited the piety and contributed to the amusement of their simple auditors, who, in the course of time, occasionally provided for these actors a stage on a green in the vicinage of their town; thus an audience of burghers and clowns, and no critics, was first formed. The ecclesiastics adopted performances so certain of popular attraction, and became the sole authors of these inartificial dramas, as they were of romances and chronicles. They had but one object, and knew to treat it only in one way. They imagined that they were instructing the people by initiating them into scriptural history, the only history then known, and by keeping the sources of popular recreation in their own hands, they looked for their success in the degree they excited their terror or their piety, and not less their ribald merriment; and for the people the profane drollery and the familiar dialogue were as consistent with their feelings as the articles of their creed, for which they would have died, as well as laughed at.

These primeval dramas are not inconsiderable objects in the philosophy of literary history. In England,7 and probably throughout Europe, they long kept their standing; they linger in Italy, and still possess devout Spain. Not long since at Seville they had their mysteries adapted to the seasons—the Crucifixion for Good Friday, and the Nativity for Christmas, and the Creation whenever they chose; and a recent editor of the plays of Cervantes assures us, that these Autos Sacramentales still form a source of amusement and edification to the pilgrims at the Shrine of St. Jago de Compostella, which it seems still receives such visitors.8

These scriptural plays were known in England before 1119; they formed public performances in the metropolis in 1180. They were then confined to the monasteries, and when the audience required the space, they were exhibited in churches, and sometimes even in cemeteries. So true it is that the first theatres were churches and the first actors churchmen. Some reprobated the sight of the priestly character, or the “fols clers,” “mad clerks,” in their grotesque disguisings; if they were sanctioned by one pope, they were condemned by another. The clergy, except on some rare occasion, when exhibiting before royalty or nobility,9 were at length not reluctant to yield their places to a new race of performers. In the metropolis they never lost their control over these representations, for they consigned them to the care of their inferior brethren, the parish clerks; but in provincial towns it was not long ere the people themselves discovered that they, with some little assistance from the neighbouring monasteries, were competent to take them into their own hands. The honest members of guilds or corporations, of mechanics and tradesmen, formed themselves into brotherhoods of actors, ambitious of displaying their mimetic faculty to their townsfolk. The play had now become the people’s play, and the scale of the representation widened at every point; it was to be acted in an open plain, and it was to extend sometimes through eight days.10 Such was the concourse of spectators, and indeed the performers were themselves a crowd. All were anxious to show themselves in some part, and such a play might require nearly a hundred personages. In a miracle-play, the whole life of a saint, from the cradle to martyrdom, was displayed in the same piece; the youth, the middle-age, and the caducity of the eminent personage required to be enacted by three different actors, so that there were the first, the second, and the third Jacob, to emulate one another, and provoke bickerings; townsfolk when acting, it appears, being querulously jealous. Something of scenical illusion was contrived, and what in the style of the green-room is termed “properties”11 was attempted, by the description we find in the directions to the actors, and by the mischances which occurred to the unpractised performers by their clumsy machinery. Their mode of representation was so much alike, that the same sort of ludicrous accidents have come down to us relative to our native mysteries, as occurred in those of France. Bishop Percy has quoted a malicious trick played by the Flemish Owl-glass, the buffoon of the times, among his neighbours in one of these mysteries;12 a Judas had nearly hanged himself, and the cross had nearly realised a crucifixion. Among these unlucky attempts they gilded over the face to represent the Eternal Father; the honest burgher, nearly suffocated, never appeared again; and the next day it was announced that for the future the Deity should lie “covered by a cloud.” A scaffold was built up of three or more divisions for “the stage-play:” Paradise opened at the top, the world moved in the centre, and the yawning throat of an immeasurable dragon, as the devils run in and out, showed the bottomless pit; and whenever the protruding wings of that infernal monster approached, “and fanned” the near spectators, the terror was real.

These mysteries abound with a licentiousness to which the rude simplicity of the age was innocently insensible; a ludicrous turn is often given to the solemn incidents of holy writ; and the legend of a saint opened an unbounded scope to their mother-wit. The usual remark of the people when they had been pleased with a performance was, “To-day the mystery was very fine and devout; and the devils played most pleasantly.”13 The devils were the buffoons, and compliment one another with the most atrocious titles. The spectators, who shed tears at the torturous crucifixion, would listen with delight to the volume of reciprocal abuse voided by Satan and the Satanic, whose very names, at any other time or place, would have paralysed the intellect. This strange mixture of religious and ludicrous emotions attests that the authors and the spectators were in the childhood of society, satisfied that they were good Christians. Such were the earliest attempts of our dramatic representations; but men must tread with naked feet before they put on the sock and buskin.

Several of these annual exhibitions in provincial towns have descended to us, as those of the Chester Whitsun-plays, and others in great towns. Originally, doubtless, written in Latin, they soon submitted to the Norman rule, vigilant to practise every means to diffuse the French language; but in this state they could not deeply delight the great body of the Saxon people.14 The monk, Ralph Higden, under the influence of that national spirit which had been evinced by some former native monks, directed his efforts to the relief of his countrymen. Thrice he journeyed to Rome to obtain the permission of his holiness to translate these holy plays into the vernacular English for the people.15 Three journeys to Rome indicate some difficulty about the propriety of this mode of edifying the populace, of which indeed there were conflicting opinions. But the time was favourable; the youthful monarch on the throne, our third Edward, was beginning to encourage the use of the vernacular idiom, and in 1338, Higden put forth mysteries in the native tongue, and thus accomplished what, in the great volume of the Polychronicon, he has so energetically exhorted should be done, for the maintenance of what he termed “the birth-tongue.”

The day could not fail to arrive in the gradations of the public intellect, even such as it then was, that society would feel the want of something more directly operating on their sympathies, or their daily experience, than the unvaried scriptural tale. Mysteries however devout, by such familiar repetition, would lose something of their awfulness, as miracle-plays would satiate their tastes, as they became deficient in the freshness of invention. The first approaches of this change in their feelings are observable in the later miracle-plays, where, as a novel attraction to the old plays, abstract personations are partially introduced; but this novelty was to be carried much higher, and to include a whole set of new dramatic personages. A more intellectual faculty was now exercised in the plan of the MORALITY, or moral play.16 This was no inconsiderable advancement in the progress of society; it was deepening the recesses of the human understanding, awakening and separating the passions; it was one of those attempts which appear in the infancy of imagination, consisting not of human beings, but of their shadowy reflections, in the personification of their passions,—in a word, it was allegory! To relieve the gravity of this ethical play, which was in some danger of calling on the audience for deeper attention than their amusement could afford, the morality not only retained their old favourite, the Devil, but introduced a more natural buffoon in the Vice, who performed the part of the domestic fool of our ancestors, or the clown of our pantomime.

These unsubstantial personages of allegory—these apparitions of human nature—were to assume a more bodily shape, when not only the passions, but the individual characters whom they agitated, were exhibited in every-day life, not however yet venturing into a wide field of society, but peeping from a corner,—it was nothing more than a single act, satirical and comic, in a dialogue sustained by three or four professional characters of the times. It was called the INTERLUDE, or “a play between,” to zest by its pleasantry the intervals of a luxurious, and sometimes a wearisome, banquet. The most dramatic interludes were the invention of John Heywood, the jester of Henry the Eighth. The Scottish Bard, Douglas, the Bishop of Dunkeld, alludes to these interludes, in his “Paleys of Honour.”

Grete was the preis the feast royál to sene, At ease they eat, with Interludes between.17

Such was the march of events, the steppings which were conducting the national genius to the verge of tragedy and comedy; a vast interval of time and labour separates the writers of these primitive plays from the fathers of dramatic art; yet however ludicrous to us the simplicity of the age, often these singular productions betray shrewd humour and natural emotions. To condemn them as barbarous and absurd would be forming a very inadequate notion of the influence of these earliest of our European dramas on their contemporaries. An enlightened lover of the arts has said, perhaps with great truth, that Raphael never received from his age such flattering applause, and excited such universal approbation, as did Cimabué, the rude father of his art. The first essays strike more deeply than even the masterpieces of a subsequent age after all its successful labour; for its more finished excellence depends partly on reflection, as well as on sensation.

The mystery and the morality lingered among us; but in the improved taste and literature of the court of Henry the Eighth, the facetious INTERLUDE, while it was facetious, won the royal smile. The successive agitations of the age, however, could not fail to reflect its tempers in these public exhibitions. In the reforming government of Edward the Sixth, the miracle-plays were looked on as Romish spectacles, and were fast sinking into neglect, when the clergy of the papistic queen retrograded into this whole fabulous mythology; adepts not only in the craft of miracles, but desirous, by these shows or “plays of miracles,” to revive the taste in the imaginations of the people. The public authorities patronised what recently they had laughed at or had scorned. On Corpus Christi day, the Lord Mayor and the Privy Council were spectators of The Passion of Christ, always an affecting drama; and it was again represented before this select audience: and on St. Olave’s day, the truly “miracle-play” of that legendary saint was enacted in the church dedicated to the saint.18

The history of the INTERLUDE more particularly marks an epoch, for it enters into our political history. Mysteries and moralities were purely religious or ethical themes, but the comic interludes took a more adventurous course; and their writers, accommodating themselves to the fashions of the day, were the organs of the prevalent factions then dividing the unquiet realm.

From the earliest moment of the projected reformation or emancipation from the Papal dominion by Henry, we discover the players of interludes at their insidious work; but affairs were floating in that uncertain state when the new had by no means displaced the old. In 1527, Henry the Eighth was greatly diverted at an interlude where the heretic Luther and his wife were brought on the stage, and the Reformers were ridiculed.19 The king in the Creed and the ceremonies remained a Romanist; and in 1533, a proclamation inhibits “the playing of enterludes concerning doctrines now in question and controversy.”20 “The Defender of the Faith” was still irresolute to defend or to attack. In 1543, an act of parliament was passed for the control of dramatic representations; and at this later date, this reforming monarch decreed, that “no person should play in interludes any matter contrary to the doctrines of the Church of Rome!” Chronology in history is not only useful to date events, but to date the passions of sovereigns. It was absolutely necessary for Edward the Sixth on his ascension immediately to repeal this express act of parliament of his father;21 and then the emancipated interluders now, openly, with grave logic or laughing ridicule, struck at all “the Roman superstitions.” Hence we had Catholic and Protestant dramas. The Romanists had made very free strictures on Cromwell, Cranmer, and their followers; and on the side of the reformed we have no deficiency of oppugners of the Romish Church. Under Henry the Eighth, we have the sacred drama of Every-man, a single personage, by whom the writer not unaptly personifies human nature. This drama came from the Romanists to recall the auditors back to the forsaken ceremonies and shaken creed of their fathers. Under Edward the Sixth, we have Lusty Juventus, whom Satan and his old son Hypocrisy, with an extraordinary nomenclature of “holy things,” would inveigle back to that seductive harlot, “Abominable Living,” which the Reformer imagined was the favourite Dulcinea of “the false priests.”22 On the accession of Mary, this queen hastened a proclamation against the interludes of the Reformers. The term used in the proclamation looks like an ironical allusion to a word which now had long been bandied on the lips of the populace. It specifies to be for “the reformation of busy meddlers in matters of religion.” A strict watch was kept on the players, some of whom suffered for enacting a reformed interlude. Such plays seem to have been patronised in domestic secrecy. The interference of the Star Chamber was called forth in 1556 for the total suppression of dramatic entertainments. In many places some magistrates had slackened their pursuit after “players,” and reluctantly obeyed the public authorities. The first act of Elizabeth resembled in its character those of her brother Edward and her sister Mary, however opposite were the systems of their governments. The queen put a sudden stop to the enacting of all interludes which opposed the progress of the Reformation; there seemed to be no objection to any of a different cast; but Elizabeth lived to be an auditor of more passionate dramas than these theological logomachies performed on the stage, where the dull poet had sometimes quoted chapter and verse in Genesis or St. Matthew.

It is not generally known that, while these Catholic and Protestant dramas were opposed to each other in England, at the same period the Huguenots in France had also entertained the derisory muse of the more comic interludes. There was, however, this difference in the fortunes of the writers; as in France the government had never reformed nor changed their position, there could have been no period which admitted of the public representation of these satirical dramas. In their dramatic history, it was long considered that the subjects of these Hugonistic dramas were too tender to bear the handling; and the brothers Parfait, in their copious “History of the French Theatre,” only afford a slight indication of “the turbulent Calvinists,” who had spread “pieces of dangerous heresy and fanaticism against the Pope, the cardinals, and the bishops; works which could not be noticed without profaning the page!”—and therefore they refrain from giving even their titles! It is in this spirit, and with such apologies, that historians have often castrated their own history. The existence of these dramas might have escaped our knowledge, had not the more enlightened judgment of the Duke de la Vallière supplied what the more stubborn Romanists had suppressed. This lover of literature has favoured the curious with the interesting analysis of two rare French Protestant plays, Le Marchand Converti, in 1558; and Le Pape Malade et tirant à sa Fin, in 1561. Allowing largely for the gross invectives of the Calvinist—“les impiétés”—they display an original comic invention, and sparkle with the most lively sallies.23 It is remarkable that Le Marchand Converti, at such an early period of modern literature, is a regular comedy of five acts, introduced by a prologue in verse; odes are interspersed, and each act concludes with a chorus, whom the author calls “the company.” The classical form of this unacted play, instinct with the spirit of the new reform, betrays the work of a learned hand.

1 Warton’s “Hist. of Eng. Poetry,” iii. 195, 8vo edition; but it has been suggested that, as Saint Gregory composed more poetically, this earliest sacred drama was the production of a later writer, another Gregory, bishop of Antioch, A.D. 572. The dramatist, however, was an ecclesiastic, and that point only is important on the present occasion.

2 Tertullian, Chrysostom, Lactantius, Cyprian, and others, have vehemently declaimed against theatres and actors. It is doubtless the invectives of the Fathers which have been the true origin of the puritanic denouncement against “stage-plays” and “play-goers.” The Fathers furnished ample quotations for Prynne in his “Histriomastix.” It is, however, curious to observe that at a later day, in the thirteenth century, the great schoolman, Thomas Aquinas, greatly relaxed the prohibitions; confessing that amusement is necessary to the happiness of man, he allows the decent exercise of the histrionic art. See a curious tract, “The Stage Condemned,” which contains a collection of the opinions of the Fathers, 1698. Riccoboni, “Sur les Théâtres,” does not fail to appeal to the great schoolman.

3 “Tiraboschi,” iv.

4 These dramas subsequently formed no uncommon spectacle in the streets of Italy, whence some Italian critics have fancied that the Gothic poem of Dante—his Hell, his Purgatory, and his Paradise—was an idea caught from the threefold stage of a mystery which often fixed his musings in the streets of his own Florence. As late as in the year 1739, a mystery of The Damned Soul, acted by living personages, was still exhibited by a company of strollers in Turin; we have the amusing particulars in a letter by Spence.—Spence’s “Anecdotes,” 397. They have sunk to the humble state of puppet-shows, and are still exhibited at Carnival time at Venice and elsewhere.

5 See the note and this extraordinary blunder in Fabliaux, ii. 152.

6 Mr. Wright has published a curious collection of Latin mysteries of the twelfth century. [For a detailed notice of other printed collections see note to “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. i. p. 352.—Ed.]

7 Perhaps the very last remains of such rude dramatic exhibitions are yet to be traced in our counties—about Christmas-tide, or rather old Christmas, whose decrepit age is personified. In Lancashire and Yorkshire, and also in Dorsetshire, families are visited by “the great Emperor of the Turks” and St. George of England, or by the lion-hearted Richard. After a fierce onset, ringing their tin swords, the Saracens groan and drop. The Leech appears holding his phial; from some drops the dead survive their fate, and rise for the hospitable supper. The dialogue, however, has not been so traditional as the exhibition. The curious portion of these ancient exhibitions is, therefore, totally lost in the substitutions of the rude rustics. The Wassail Songs, or the Christmas Carols, have come down with fewer losses than these ancient “Tales of the Crusaders;” for the language of emotion, and the notice of old picturesque customs, cling to the memory, and endure with their localities. But for these we must travel far from the land of the Cockneys.

8 Bouterwek.

9 The clergy long continued to assist at these exhibitions, if they did not always act in them. In 1417, an English Mystery was exhibited before the Emperor Sigismund, at the Council of Constance, on the usual subject of the Nativity. The English Bishops had it rehearsed several days, that the actors might be perfect before their imperial audience. We are not told in what language their English Mystery was recited; but we are furnished with a curious fact, that “the Germans consider this play as the first introduction of that sort of dramatic performance in their country.”—“Henry of Monmouth,” by the Rev. J. E. Tyler, ii. 61.

10 The Spanish nation, unchangeable in their customs, have retained the last remains of the ancient Mysteries in the divisions of their dramas, called “Jornadas.”

11 “A sheep-skin for Jews, wigs for the Apostles, and vizards for Devils,” appear in the churchwardens’ accounts at Tewkesbury, 1578, “for the players’ geers.”—“Hist. of Dramatic Poetry,” ii. 140. The same diligent inquirer has also discovered the theatrical term “properties,” in allusion to the furniture of the stage, and which is so used by Shakspeare, employed in its present sense in an ancient morality.—Ib. ii. 129.

12 “Reliques of Ancient Poetry,” i. 129.

13 “Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française.”—The proverbial phrase is accompanied by a very superfluous remark—“Ce mot a passé d’usage avec les mœurs de ces temps anciens.” See also “Dict. de Trevoux,” art. Mystère.

14 That the translation of the “Chester Plays” was made from the French, and not from the Latin, as Warton supposed, is ingeniously elucidated by Mr. Collier. In the English translation, some of the original French passages have been preserved.—“Annals of the Stage,” ii. 129.

When Warton found that these plays were translated into English, he concluded that they were from the Latin. He totally forgot that the French was long the prevalent language of England. And this important circumstance, too often overlooked by preceding inquirers, has thrown much confusion in our literary history.

The best account we have of Ralph Higden may be found in the first volume of Lardner’s Cyclopædia on “The Early History of the English Stage,” a work of some original research, at page 193.

15 The earliest and rudest known miracle-play in English has been published by Mr. Halliwell—The Harrowing of Hell. It was written in the reign of Edward the Second, and is a curious instance of the childhood of the drama.

16 The reign of Henry the Sixth may he fixed upon as the epoch of a new species of dramatic representation, known by the name of a moral.—Collier, i. 23.

17 The reader may gratify his curiosity, and derive considerable amusement, from the skilful analysis of primitive dramas, both manuscript and printed, which Mr. Collier has drawn up with true dramatic taste. There are also copious specimens in a curious article on Heywood in the volume on “The English Drama” of Lardner’s Cyclopædia,—the labour of a learned antiquary. [One of Heywood’s Interludes was printed by the Percy Society from his MS. in the British Museum, under the editorial care of Mr. Fairholt; who prefixed an analysis with copious extracts from his other Interludes.] The progress of the drama was similar both in France and England, yet our vivacious neighbours seem to have invented a peculiar burlesque piece of their own, under the title of Sotties, and whose chief personage takes the quality of Prince des Sots; and La Mère Sotte, who is represented with her infant Sots. These pieces still retained their devout character, with an intermixture of profane and burlesque scenes, highly relished by the populace. “Ils le nommèrent par un quolibet vulgaire, Jeux de Pois pilez, et ce fut selon toutes les apparences à cause de mélange du sacré et du profane qui régnait dans ces sortes de jeux.” The cant phrase which the people coined for this odd mixture of sacred and farcical subjects, of Mashed Peas, may lose its humour with us, but we find by Bayle, art. “D’Assoucy,” that they were collected and printed under this title, and fetched high prices among collectors. These Sotties were acted by a brotherhood calling themselves Enfans sans Soucy.—Parfait, “Hist. du Théâtre Français,” i. 52. One of their chief composers was Pierre Gringoire, of whose rare Sotties I have several reprints by the learned Abbé Caron. Gringoire invented and performed his Sotties, in ridicule of the Pope, on a scaffold or stage, to charm his royal master, Louis the Twelfth, in 1511; for an ample list of his gay satires see “Biog. Universelle,” art. “Gringoire.”

18 Strype’s “Mem. of Eccles. Hist.,” iii. 379.

19 “Annals of the Stage,” i. 107.

20 Warton’s “Hist. of Eng. Poetry,” iii. 428, 8vo.

21 Rastell’s “Collection of Statutes,” fo. 32—d.

22 Both these ancient dramas are reprinted in Hawkins’ “Origin of the English Drama.” Many such dramas remain in manuscript.

23 “Bibliothèque du Théâtre Français,” iii. 263, ascribed to the Duke de la Vallière. He has preserved many passages exquisitely humorous. He felt awkwardly in performing his duty to his readers, after what his predecessors, Messieurs Parfait, had declared;—and, to calm the terrors of les personnes scrupuleuses, it is amusing to observe his plea, or his apology, for noticing these admirable antipapistic satires:—“They are outrageous and abound with impieties; but they are extremely well written for their time, and truly comic. I considered that I could not avoid giving these extracts, were it only to show to what lengths the first pretended reformers carried their unreasonable violence against the holy Father, and the court of Rome.” The apology for their transcription, if not more ingenuous, is at least more ingenious than the apology for their suppression.

THE REFORMER BISHOP BALE; AND THE ROMANIST JOHN HEYWOOD, THE COURT JESTER.

Bale, Bishop of Ossory, and John Heywood, the court jester, were contemporaries, and both equally shared in the mutable fortunes of the satiric dramas of their times; but they themselves were the antipodes of each other: the earnest Protestant Bale, the gravest reformer, and the inflexible Catholic Heywood, noted for “his mad merry wit,” form one of those remarkable disparities which the history of literature sometimes offers.

Bale was originally educated in a monastery; he found an early patron, and professed the principles of the Reformation; and, like Luther, sealed his emancipation from Catholic celibacy by a wife, whom he tenderly describes as “his faithful Dorothea.” It was a great thing for a monk to be mated with such constancy at a time when women were usually to be described as shrews, or worse. From the day of marriage the malice of persecution haunted the hapless heretic; such personal hatreds could not fail of being mutual. He seems to have too hastily anticipated the Reformation under Henry the Eighth, for though that monarch had freed himself from “the bishop of Rome,” he had by no means put aside the doctrines, and Bale, who had already begun a series of two-and-twenty reforming interludes in his “maternal idiom,” found it advisable to leave a kingdom but half reformed. He paused not, however, till he had written a whole library against “the Papelins,” the last production always seemed the most envenomed. On the death of Henry he unexpectedly appeared before Edward the Sixth, who imagined that he had died. Bale had the misfortune to be promoted to the Irish bishopric of Ossory—to plant Protestantism in a land of Papistry! Frustrated in his unceasing fervour, Bale escaped from martyrdom by hiding himself in Dublin. The death of Edward relieved our Protestant bishop from this sad dilemma; for on the accession of Mary he flew into Switzerland. There he indulged his anti-papistical vein; the press sent forth a brood, among which might have been some of better growth, for he laboured on our British biography and literature; but as there were yet but few Protestants to record, it flowed, and sometimes overflowed, against all the friends of the Papacy; Pits, who subsequently resumed the task, a sullen and fierce Papist, in revenge omitted in the line of our illustrious Britons, Wickliffe and every Wickliffite. Such were the beginnings of our literary history. On the accession of Elizabeth, his country received back its exile; but Bale refused to be reinstated in his Irish see, and sunk into a quiet prebendary of Canterbury. Fuller has called our good bishop “Bilious Bale.” Some conceive that this bishop has suffered ill-treatment merely for having thrown out some remarkable, or abominable, invectives. Proselytes, however sincere in their new convictions and their old hatreds, both operating at once, colour their style as some do their faces, till by long use the heightened tint seems faint, and they go on deepening it, and thus at last the natural countenance is lost in the artificial mass.

If Bale were no poet, in the singular dramas we have, he at least displays a fluent invention; he tells plainly what is meant, which we like to learn; and I do not know whether it be owing to his generally indifferent verse that we sometimes are struck by an idiomatic phrase, and a richness of rhymes peculiar to himself, which sustain our attention.1

Of John Heywood, the favourite jester of Henry the Eighth and his daughter Mary, and the intimate of Sir Thomas More, whose congenial humour may have mingled with his own, more table-talk and promptness at reply have been handed down to us than of any writer of the times. His quips, and quirks, and quibbles are of his age, but his copious pleasantry still enlivens; these smoothed the brow of Henry, and relaxed the rigid muscles of the melancholy Mary. He had the entrée at all times to the privy-chamber, and often to administer a strong dose of himself, which her majesty’s physicians would prescribe. He is distinguished as Heywood the epigrammatist; a title fairly won by the man who has left six centuries of epigrams, collected and adjusted as many English proverbs in his verse, besides the quaint conceits of “crossing of proverbs.”2 Of these six hundred epigrams it is possible not a single one is epigrammatic: we have never had a Martial. Even when it became a fashion, to write books of epigrams half a century subsequently, they usually closed in a miserable quibble, a dull apophthegm, or at the best, like those of Sir John Harrington, in a plain story rhymed. Wit, in our sense of the term, was long unpractised, and the modern epigram was not yet discovered.