when he had attained a great age, employed his pen principally in translations, in which line his most celebrated performance is his Ship of Fools, from the German of Sebastian Brandt, which was printed in 1508. Barklay, however, besides consulting both a French and a Latin version of Brandt's poem, has enlarged his original with the enumeration and description of a considerable variety of follies which he found flourishing among his own countrymen. This gives the work some value as a record of the English manners of the time; but both its poetical and its satirical pretensions are of the very humblest order. At this date most of our writers of what was called poetry seem to have been occupied with the words in which they were to clothe their ideas almost to the exclusion of all the higher objects of the poetic art. And that, perhaps, is what of necessity happens at a particular stage in the progress of a nation's literature-at the stage corresponding to the transition state in the growth of the human being between the termination of free rejoicing boyhood and the full assurance of manhood begun; which is peculiarly the season not of achievement but of preparation, not of accomplishing ends, but of acquiring the use of means and instruments, and also, it may be added, of the aptitude to mistake the one of these things for the other. SKELTON. But the poetry with the truest life in it produced in the reign of Henry the Seventh and the earlier part of that of his son is undoubtedly that of Skelton. John Skelton may have been born about or soon after 1460; he studied at Cambridge, if not at both universities; began to write and publish compositions in verse between 1480 and 1490; was graduated as poet laureat (a degree in grammar, including versification and rhetoric) at Oxford before 1490; was admitted ad eundem at Cambridge in 1493; in 1498 took holy orders; was probably about the same time appointed tutor to the young prince Henry, afterwards Henry the Eighth; was eventually promoted to be rector of Diss in Norfolk; and died in 1529 in the sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, where he had taken refuge to escape the vengeance of Cardinal Wolsey, originally his patron, but latterly the chief butt at which he had been wont to shoot his satiric shafts. As a scholar Skelton had a European reputation in his own day; and the great Erasmus has styled him Britannicarum literarum decus et lumen (the light and ornament of English letters). His Latin verses are distinguished by their purity and classical spirit. As for his English poetry, it is generally more of a mingled yarn, and of a much coarser fabric. In many of his effusions indeed, poured forth in sympathy with or in aid of some popular cry of the day, he is little better than a rhyming buffoon; much of his ribaldry is now nearly unintelligible; and it may be doubted if a considerable portion of his grotesque and apparently incoherent jingle ever had much more than the sort of half meaning with which a half-tipsy writer may satisfy readers as far gone as himself. Even in the most reckless of these compositions; however, he rattles along, through sense and nonsense, with a vivacity that had been a stranger to our poetry for many a weary day; and his freedom and spirit, even where most unrefined, must have been exhilarating after the long fit of somnolency in which the English muse had dozed away the last hundred years. But much even of Skelton's satiric verse is instinct with genuine poetical vigour, and a fancy alert, sparkling, and various, to a wonderful degree. It is impossible, where the style and manner are, if not so discursive, at least so rushing and river-like, to give any complete idea of the effect by extracts; but we will transcribe a small portion of the bitterest of his attacks upon Wolsey, his satire, or "little book," as he designates it, entitled Why come ye not to court? extending in all to nearly 1300 lines: Our barons be so bold Into a mouse-hole they wold Rin away and creep, Like a meiny of sheep; Dare not look out at dur For dread of the mastiff cur, They must stand all afar, For all their noble blood, He plucks them by the hood, And brings them in such fear; He baiteth them like a bear, Their wits he saith are dull; He saith they have no brain Their estate to maintain, And maketh them to bow their knee Before his majesty. In the chancery where he sits, But such as he admits None so hardy as to speak: Thy tongue is not well thewd,' And openly in that place He rages and he raves, And calls them cankered knaves. Thus royally doth he deal Under the king's broad seal; And in the Checker he them checks; In the Star Chamber he nods and becks, And beareth him there so stout That no man dare rowt.3 Duke, earl, baron, nor lord,4 But to his sentence must accord; But this mad Amalek He regardeth lords No more than potshords; 1 Well mannered. 2 In original spelling seke. Qy. a typographical error for speke (or speak)? 3 Snort. 6 Witness. 4 That is, no duke, &c. 7 Regard to propriety. 5 Mamaluke. He would dry up the streams Of nine kings' reams," All rivers and wells, All water that swells; For with us he so mells4 He will drink us so dry, With the devil of hell! He wold so brag and crake, That he wold than make The devils to quake, To shudder and to shake, Like a fire-drake,5 And with a coal rake Bruise them on a brake, And bind them to a stake, And set hell on fire At his own desire. He is such a grim sire, And such a potestolate,7 And such a potestate, That he wold brake the brains Of Lucifer in his chains, And rule them each one In Lucifer's trone.8 I wold he were gone, For among us is none That ruleth but he alone, And all out of season, &c. Another of Skelton's satirical invectives, his Bouge of Court (that is, Bouche à Court, diet allowed at court), which is written in the common stanza of seven decasyllabic lines, and altogether with much more sobriety, has some strong allegorical painting, but in a hard and heavy style; and the force is also more conspicuous than the invention. Another of his productions is a drama, entitled Magnificence, a Goodly Interlude and a Merry, in rhyme, and running to nearly 2600 long lines, the characters being Felicity, Liberty, Measure, Counterfeit Countenance, Crafty Conveyance, Cloaked Collusion, Courtly Abusion, and other such shadowy personages. But Skelton's brightest and in all respects happiest poetry is surely what of it is neither allegorical nor satirical. The charm of his writing lies in its natural ease and freedom, its inexhaustible and untiring vivacity; and these qualities are found both in their greatest abundance and their greatest purity where his subject is suggestive of the simplest emotions and has most of a universal interest. His Book of Philip Sparrow, for instance, an elegy on the sparrow of fair Jane Scroop, slain by a cat in the nunnery of Carow, near Norwich, extending (with the "commendation" of the "goodly maid") to nearly 1400 lines, is unrivalled in the language for elegant and elastic playfulness, and a spirit of whim that only kindles into the higher blaze the longer it is kept up. The second part, or "Commendation," in particular, is throughout animated and hilarious to a wonderful degree :—the refrain,— For this most goodly flower, So Jupiter me succour, She flourisheth new and new In beauty and virtue; Hac claritate gemina, O Gloriosa femina, &c.— recurring often so suddenly and unexpectedly, yet always so naturally, has an effect like that of the harmonious evolutions of some lively and graceful dance. Have we not in this poem, by |