The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of English Literature from Beowulf to Swinburne, by Andrew Lang.

His remarks on the task of the translator show considerable reflection. On comparing the poem with the Latin it seems more close in sense to the great untranslatable original than might have been expected in an uncritical age and country. It is the first attempt in our language at the rendering of a great ancient classic, and, as such, looks forward to the new times, and to the Renaissance which, in Scotland, was mainly confined to Biblical criticism.

After Flodden, Gawain was immersed in politics, and in a long and futile struggle to obtain, through English influence, the Archbishopric of St. Andrews. For this he fought a triangular duel (nor were the weapons of the flesh unused), with Hepburn, the Prior, and Forman, a clerical diplomatist, who was successful. Gawain obtained the petty Bishopric of Dunkeld, on the Tay, and died when on a political mission to London (1522). Gawain is almost the only Scottish example of a nobleman and a Churchman, in his age, distinguished for devotion to literary scholarship. There are a number of Scots poems, of this date, such as "Christ's Kirk on the Green" and "Peebles at the Play" (the best of them), which show much command of lively metre and rude descriptive powers where rustic merriment and horseplay are to be painted. But their dialect is usually uncouth, and they are only appreciated by special students.

The most popular of the old Scottish poets was not so poetical as Henryson, but gave pleasure by his genial character, his extremely coarse humour, and his attacks on the Churchmen and on abuses in the State. This author, Sir David Lyndsay, was born, perhaps at his family place, the Mount, in Fife, about 1490. His name "Da. Lyndsay" (if it be his) appears in the register of St. Andrews University besides that of the man whom he hated so much, and attacked in verse after his murder, the great Cardinal Beaton. By 1511, Lyndsay was a page at Court, and acted in a play at Holyrood. In 1512, Lyndsay was Master of the Household, or chief attendant of the infant Prince, later James V. He was present when the apparition described in "Marmion" gave a warning, in church, to James IV, just before Flodden, and told Lyndsay of Pitscottie, the amusing chronicler, that he tried to arrest the figure "but he vanished away as if he had been a blink of the sun or a whiz of the whirlwind". Till 1522 his chief business was to teach and amuse the boy, James V;

and, later, told him fairy tales such as the story of the Red Etin, or disguised himself as "the grisly ghost of Guy".

About 1528 Lyndsay wrote "The Dreame" (the usual allegorical dream), in 1529 he was made chief herald, "Lord Lyon King of Arms," and as such went on many foreign embassies. In 1539-1540 his great play, "The Satire of the Three Estates," was acted before the Court; it is the only early Scottish drama that survives. There are two Parts, and three interludes full of matter wonderfully coarse. The play is all in favour of reforms, and is full of the satire of the Churchmen and pleadings for the poor which ensured its popularity. There are some seventy characters, most of them allegorical personages. The King delighted in the satire, and as Lyndsay attacked the vices of the clergy and the Pardoners, not the doctrines of the Church, he ran no risk of martyrdom. The verse is in many forms and different sorts of stanzas, in rhyming couplets of eight syllables, or of ten or more.

After James's death and the murder of Cardinal Beaton, Lyndsay wrote a poem, "The Tragedy of the Cardinal" in which his ghost accuses himself of many sins and crimes, and is sure that Boccaccio would write "my tragedie," if Boccaccio were still alive. Lyndsay died early in 1555. His most popular poem, probably, was a good-humoured romance, "Squire Meldrum," about the fighting adventures, at home and abroad, of a young Fife laird of the period. He wrote many other things, humorous or grave, admonitions to the King, and a reply to a "Flyting" or scolding, of the King against him, in verse; unluckily the Royal lampoon is lost. A Lament for James's first wife who died young; a very humorous set of verses on the King's dog; and a "Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier," with shorter pieces, grave or gay, make up Lyndsay's contribution to the literature of his country. They are full of historical hints, but, merely as poetry, are now seldom read, as Henryson may be read, for pleasure. The Reformation, breaking out in 1559, distracted men's minds from secular literature, to which, for more than a century, Scotland contributed nothing of real importance except the "History of the Reformation" by John Knox, the Reformer. This work is written in such English (not Scots) as Knox could command, for in origin it was meant to be read in England, and to justify the proceedings of the Reformers. It is partly derived from memory of the events and the memory is sometimes strangely inaccurate. Public documents are inserted at full length, in one case with some lack of candour, and actions are denied which, later, were acknowledged. The book, as history, needs to be cautiously studied, but as a picture of the men and women of the age, especially of Knox himself and Queen Mary, it is most vivacious, and may be read with interest and amusement. Knox's other works, theological, epistolary, and political, were written to meet the needs of the moment, and are of little value except to historians and students of the career and character of the author.

[1] See proofs by Mr. George Neilson, in Blind Harry's "Wallace," "Essays and Studies," by Members of the English Association, 1910.

CHAPTER XV.

POPULAR POETRY. BALLADS.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England and Scotland were rich in popular poetry and in ballads. We must define the meaning of "popular" and "ballad" poetry, as used in this chapter.

Much confusion and much controversy exist regarding this matter of ballads and popular poetry. To understand the subject it is necessary to be acquainted with the results of research in the orally transmitted verse of peoples in every stage of culture; for till elementary instruction in reading and writing become universal, the untaught rural classes retain, in their songs, the literary methods of the quite uncivilized races of Australia, North America, Africa, and so on.

Taking the, peoples lowest in civilization, we find that the Australian blacks and the American Red Indians have several kinds of songs, usually sung in dances, whether festive or religious or magical. They have magic chants, and even hymns, often unintelligible to those who sing them in the dance, either because the language is obsolete, or because the songs have been borrowed from tribes of alien speech. It is clear that in Europe, too, the ballad was originally a dancing song ("ballad" is from ballare, to dance), and where a story was told, that was given in recitative, while the dancers followed each line of narrative with a chorus or refrain, such as

There were three ladies lived in a bower,
Oh wow! bonnie.
And they went out to pu' a flower
On the bonnie banks o' Fordie.

The story told in the recitative, in surviving examples, was probably, at first, composed by one author, versifying a popular tale, of unknown antiquity, or narrating some recent event. Even now in the remoter isles of the Hebrides, various singers, each in turn, improvise and chant verses, and thus a kind of ballad is made collectively. But it is plain that for each of our oldest surviving narrative ballads there must have been one original author, whether his theme was an old story or a recent occurrence,—on the Borders usually a cattle raid, the escape of a prisoner, or a battle. There would be no professional poet, as Queen Mary's ally, Bishop Leslie of Ross tells us, in his "History of Scotland," "the Borderers themselves make their own ballads, about the deeds of their ancestors, or crafty raids or forays". Such unwritten songs would be altered by every singer, as time went by, so that these ballads as they stand are thoroughly popular and "masterless," many hands have combined to bring them into their present state.

The Robin Hood ballads, or songs about Robin Hood, are mentioned by Piers Plowman as popular among the peasants at the end of the fourteenth century. They would be sung in connexion with the very ancient festivities of May Day, held in England and Scotland, when money was collected, rather roughly, from spectators and passers-by. Now Wynkyn de Worde, the successor of Caxton as a printer, published a "Lytil Geste" of Robin Hood (about 1490). But we are not obliged to suppose that the songs known to Piers Plowman were borrowed from the "long Geste" of Robin Hood; more probably the "Geste" was derived from the popular traditions and rhymes of the May Day show of Robin Hood. How far these ballads as they now exist have been organized and improved upon by a professional minstrel it is hard to say. In any case the older ballads are worthy of merry England.

The ballads of King Arthur are manifestly popularized and reduced to the simple ballad form from the long literary romances, and are probably the work of lowly professional minstrels.

The long ballad of "Flodden Field" is the work of a partisan of the Stanley family, it is far too long (over 500 lines), and too full of historical detail, for a ballad made by the Borderers themselves. "Scottish Field" (Flodden) is another piece of the same sort, in alliterative measure.

The class of ballad which was made as a narrative of current events, or a satire on contemporaries (of such ballad-satires Henry VIII complained to James V) was usually, in England, the work of a versifying journalist of the humblest sort, and was printed. John Knox tells us that ballads were made on Queen Mary's Four Maries (Mary Livingstone, Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton), and these, it is plain, were satirical. But the only survivor of these ballads, "Mary Hamilton," is romantic, and in all its many various forms transfers, to a non-existent Mary, the misfortunes of a French waiting-maid of the Queen, who, with her lover, an apothecary, was hanged for the murder of their child. In only one text is the lover an apothecary: the lady is sometimes not an apocryphal Hamilton, but a Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll; or a daughter of the Duke of York, or even "Mary Mild" (or Mile) which is the name of our Lady in old carols. For the lover, the poet chooses Henry Darnley, husband of Queen Mary, or that old offender, "Sweet Willie," or any one; and this is a good example of the changes which popular ballads underwent in recitation. As they stand, the multitude has collaborated in them, reciters have altered the original in many ways.

Such ballads differ much from "Lady Bessy," with its 1080 lines, probably written by Humphrey Brereton in honour of the House of Stanley and of Lady Bessie's revenge on Richard III. Some verses are as spirited as those of "Kinmont Willie," a Border ballad to which Scott lent the vigour of the last and greatest of the Border makers, for probably the finest verses in the song are by Sir Walter himself: at all events he improved what old verses he found.

At Bosworth Field, when all is lost, Sir William Harrington says to Richard III:—

"There may no man their strokes abide,
The Stanleys' dints they be so strong,
Ye may come in another time;
Therefore methink ye tarry too long."

"Give me my battle-axe in my hand,
And set my crown on my head so high,
For by Him that made both sea and land,
King of England will I this day die.

"One foot of ground I will not flee
While the strength abides my breast within,"
As he said so did it be,
If he lost his life he died a king.

The early history of our purely romantic ballads, such as "Clerk Sanders," "The Douglas Tragedy," "The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow," "Young Beichan," "The Wife of Usher's Well," "Fair Annie," "Tamlane," and many more, is obscure. They have analogues in all European countries, from Greece to Scandinavia, and in popular tales, the oldest things in literature. Their extraordinary charm, their touch of supernatural terror, their simplicity, their recurring formulæ of words, their brevity and pathos, make them things apart. The heart of humanity is their maker, though in each country where they exist local allusions and local colour have been given to them by the singers. When such ballads have been worked over by some hack of the early Press they are often worthless; the best have been collected from oral recitation, or old written copies.

There can be no universal theory of the origin of ballads; each ballad must be examined by itself before we can say whether it is a popularized shape of a literary romance, or a versified "Märchen" worked over by many hands in many ages, or a mere mythical news-letter, like "King James and Brown"; or the work, like "Otterburne," of a humbler poet than the minstrels of the Stanleys, but a better poet; or one whose work has been improved by the modifications of later singers; or whether the thing is a dance song, contributed to by each dancer in turn; or a brief and beautiful lament like "The Bonny Earl o' Murray". The best traditional ballads have the colour and fragrance of wild flowers.

Curious and very ancient traits of popular usages may be gathered from the songs of merrymaking, for example in the songs of Ivy, the badge of the women, and of Holly, the badge of the men. Girls and lads bring ivy and holly into halls and a fight ensues, the girls are thrust out into the cold.

"Nay, nay Ivy it may not be, I wis,
For Holly must have mastery, as the manner is."

The girls burned the "Holly boy" of the men, the men burned the "Ivy maid" of the girls. This ancient feud of the sexes, and of their patron birds, exists among the tribes of South-Eastern Australia, the men killing the bird of the women, the women the bird of the men, and an amorous kind of combat follows.

The old ballad of "Chevy Chace," a form of the older ballad on the battle of Otterburn (1388) was warmly praised by Sir Philip Sidney. Later Addison took delight in ballads: they began to be collected and printed in volumes towards the end of the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth century. In 1765 Bishop Percy printed many ballads and other early poems from a manuscript, the "Folio" which he found, tattered and mutilated, in the house of a friend. Percy, in his "Reliques," omitted, altered and modernized the contents of the Folio, but it was very popular. In 1803 and later Sir Walter Scott published "The Border Minstrelsy," containing many excellent old ballads, in places modified by himself, from manuscripts, recitations, and printed copies. It is in "The Minstrelsy" that we find the "classical" versions of the ballads; there are many other collections.

We have put into smaller type a short account of the probable origins and development of the ballad, because a study of these subjects is mainly based on folk-lore and on research into the unwritten poetry of backward races. The reader of poetry who is not concerned about an obscure and difficult subject, is best advised if he takes up Scott's "Border Minstrelsy" and reads it "for human pleasure". He will find endless variety of strong, simple, passionate poetry, seldom made difficult by obsolete words, for the ballads are, however old, far less Scots in language than the poems of Burns. Another good collection is the abridgement by Professor Kittredge, of the late Professor Child's vast collection of ballads in five volumes, a work indispensable to the special student.

Though it is not a ballad, the most beautiful and loyal piece of masterless poetry of this age is "The Nut Brown Maid," already old when it was published in 1502. This is a defence of woman's faithfulness in love, the maid will follow her outlawed lover to the greenwood, ay, even if he have another lady there. Her lover replies:—

Lo yet, before, ye must do more,
Yf ye wyll go with me:
As cut your here up by your ere,
Your kyrtel by the kne;
With bowe in hande, for to withstande
Your enemyes, yf nede be.

Scott's song, "Greta Banks," in "Rokeby," repeats the sentiment and metre of this beautiful poem, with its music and mastery of changing refrains and various measures. Some of the carols too, such as "I sing of a Maid," are the earliest notes in the bird-like music of the lyrists under Elizabeth and Charles I.

Meanwhile professional poetry of society and the Court was sinking to the lowest depth. The verse of the prolific priest and scholar, John Skelton (born 1460? died 1529?), leads nowhere, and though it is full of historical and personal interest, must not detain us. Skelton had honours of a sort, as Laureate, from Oxford, Cambridge, and Louvain. He translated parts of Cicero and other classics, and, in 1500, was highly praised by the famous Erasmus, who later brought the study of the New Testament in Greek to England, and was the wittiest of scholars in the Revival of Learning and of Greek literature. Skelton had Latin enough, of Greek not much, and about 1500 was tutor of the future Henry VIII. His profuse poetry is mainly in long but lively stretches of doggerel; very short rhyming verses, generally satirical, poured from him ceaselessly. He had a "flyting" or scolding match like that of Dunbar and Kennedy, with Sir Christopher Garnesche; he lamented at terrible length the death of "Philip Sparrow," slain by "our Cat Gib"—nothing can be less like Catullus's dirge for Lesbia's sparrow, but some graceful compliments to young ladies are intermixed with the doggerel. He owed the Rectory of Diss, Norfolk, probably to his patron, Wolsey, but for some unknown reason he later pursued Wolsey with libellous satires.

In "The Bowge of Court," when he relapses into stanzas and the outworn allegorical verbiage, he satirizes Court life. In "Colyn Clout," his hero is a tramp, as vehement in attack on all sorts and conditions of men as Piers Plowman. Wolsey was attacked as a despot in "Colyn Clout," and much more bitterly assailed in "Why come ye not to Court": after writing this piece Skelton fled from his foes and creditors to sanctuary in Westminster. He wrote a long "Morality," "Magnificence," with the usual personified vices and virtues. In very bad taste he hurled doggerel at "King Jimmy," James IV, after his glorious death at Flodden, and, more deservedly, attacked the Scots who deserted the Duke of Albany and the French when the Duke wished to lead them across the Tweed.

A brief sample of Skelton when most Skeltonical is his reply to the alleged boast of the Scots that they won the battle of Flodden.

That is as true
As black is blue
And green is grey
Whatever they say
Jemmy is dead
And closed in lead,
That was their own king:
Fie on that winning!

Even in his own country, as he admits, the execrable taste of Skelton was reproved. He had a rude kind of vigour, but his verses make it manifest that a new strain of blood, as it were, was needed in English poetry: old forms, such as the allegorical form, were outworn quite, and verse resembling the poem of Aramis, in lines of one syllable, could not endure, while Skelton's "Crown of Laurel" mixes his own blusterous humour with the stale learning, and pompous allegory of the fifteenth century; and "The Tunning of Eleanor Rummyng" (an ale-wife), in doggerel, is as offensive as the Scottish song, "There was a haggis in Dunbar," and extends to 620 lines. Very truly quoth Skelton:—

Alexander Barclay (died 1552) was probably not a Scot, though his name is spelt in the Scots not the English way (Berkeley). His high praises of James IV of Scotland, however, scarcely indicate an English author, and he was very early regarded as a Scot. He was a priest, a monk of Ely; he dwelt long at St. Mary Ottery in Devon, and was a copious translator. His "Ship of Fools" (1508-1509) is from the German "Narrenschiff" of Sebastian Brandt: his "Castle of Labour," from the French of Gringore was an earlier work. His "Eclogues," in part translated, are very unlike those of Virgil, and their contents are growls in the style of "Colyn Clout".

Barclay used French and Latin versions of the "Narrenschiff," as well as the original "Dutch". He altered and added to his original as he pleased, and he prolongs the cry against abuses raised by Piers Plowman. A writer who takes all follies and vices for his theme, from the frauds of friars, the wickedness of heretics, the oppressions of knights, to the peevishness of the patient who kicks over the table on which the physic bottles stand, can never want matter, and Barclay's matter is exceeding abundant.

But the clever contemporary woodcuts that illustrate his satire are better than his two thousand irregular stanzas in rhyme royal, and if Barclay quarrelled with Skelton the affair is like a feud between Bavius and Maevius. The two writers are characteristic of their rude and chaotic age, which, as regards all but popular poetry, was the dark hour before the dawn.

CHAPTER XVI.

RISE OF THE DRAMA.

In one shape or another, the drama, acting with or without written words, is always in existence, at least in the form of pantomime, even among the rudest peoples. The Church permitted a kind of half-ritual, half-dramatic representation of sacred scenes at a very early period: but we have no earlier relic of English written plays than the very brief "Harrowing of Hell" of the first half of the fourteenth century. There are a few speeches between our Lord and Satan, and our Lord and the released Hebrew patriarchs. A good idea of the plays of the fifteenth century may be obtained from the set called the "Townley Plays" because the manuscript belonged at one time to the old Jacobite family of Townley. It is thought to have been originally the property of the Abbey of Woodkirk or Widkirk near Wakefield, and one play, the second play representing the Shepherds at the birth of Christ, contains allusions to the country scenes near Woodkirk. The plays were acted on movable wooden stages, by the members of the various trade guilds, such as the Glovers, the Barkers (Tanners, "There is brass on the target of barkened bull's hide," says Scott in "Bonnie Dundee"), the Grocers, and so forth.

The plays of one town are sometimes the basis of the plays of another town, some of those of York follow those of Wakefield, and in places Wakefield borrows from York. The authors are unknown; if they were priests, these clerics had much more of broad humour than of reverence as we understand it. No doubt the plays informed the spectators on points of the scriptural story, but the religion was highly recreative. Nothing can have been more amusing to the crowd than the spectacle of their neighbours playing all manner of highly laughable pranks by way of illustrating the gross, grumbling, reckless, impudent Cain; or the rustic waggeries of the local shepherds of Bethlehem. Even now the words of the plays make a man laugh aloud, in the comic parts, as he reads them. They are of the broadest farce, yet our mirth rises more from the character displayed than from mere practical buffoonery and clowning. The Tanners enacted the "Creation"; the Glovers, the "Death of Abel". Many Old Testament stories were played, the unaccomplished Sacrifice of Isaac, the story of Abraham, and so on, with the Birth, Crucifixion, and Ascension of our Lord, and the soliloquy and suicide of Judas, a fragment.

Whoever the authors may have been, they took pains to represent the most unearthly characters as very human, though the opening soliloquy of the Deity at the Creation is orthodox and majestic. The Cherubim then take up the tale, praising the Works, especially praising Lucifer, "He is so lovely and so bright!" Lucifer enters and, accepting the praise, proposes to be Lord of all and says that the Throne becomes him rarely, taking his seat on it! The bad Angels approve in the most colloquial style; the good dissent, and the bad, sent down below, express their lively regrets.

The slaying of Abel is introduced by Garcio, not a scriptural character, in an impudent speech; and then Cain enters, ploughing, cursing his horses, and wrangling with his boy, who offers to fight him. Abel enters, full of human kindness, but Cain insults him in the coarsest rustic manner, "Go to the Devil and say I bade". Abel insists that Cain should offer a burnt-sacrifice of a tenth of his corn, but Cain loves paying tithes no more than any other farmer. He grumbles in the true natural tone of the depressed agriculturist,

The weather is such, says Cain, that the farmer owes no gratitude to providence, no tithes. He selects his worst sheaves, as pay tithe he must. The Deity intervenes, but Cain treats him with the most serene insolence, kills the remonstrating Abel with the jaw-bone of some animal, and, in short, is no more edifying than Mr. Punch, whose lawless and irreverent behaviour in the popular street drama is a survival of the humour of Cain.

The "Rejoicing of the Shepherds," the second play, is much more human and various: the shepherds are full of the complaints of their condition with which Piers Plowman has made us familiar, but the provisions at their picnic are rich and various, and the adventure of Mak, the sheep stealer, is of the best comedy. Hospitably entertained by the shepherds, Mak steals a sheep, flays it, and takes it home to his wife. They put it in a cradle, and cover it with blankets, next Mak hies to the shepherds again, grumbling that his wife has a new baby. They suspect and follow him; he denies his theft, and will eat the child in the cradle, if the sheep can be found on his premises. It is found. This child, says a shepherd, has too long a snout. Mrs. Mak, with much presence of mind, admits the fact, but declares that her child is a fairy changeling: fairies stole the baby at midnight, and left this ugly substitute. The shepherds forgive Mak, for the joke's sake, after tossing him in a sheet.

The same story is told of Archy Armstrong, the border reiver and jester. When the shepherds go back to their flocks, the Angel sings Gloria in excelsis; and the shepherds criticize the music learnedly, "there was no crochet wrong," and imitate the air. The sacred part of the play, the Adoration, and offering of balls and toys to the new-born babe, is very brief. The play is a most humorous and lively representation of "our liberal shepherds," the sacred narrative merely affords a pretext for the gambol. England was merry England in the fifteenth century, in spite of defeats in France, murder and civil war at home, preachings and burnings of Lollards, and all the grievances of Piers Plowman, the cruelty of the great, and the greed and cunning of the Friars.

The play of "Lazarus," on the other hand, is not only solemn, closely following the words of the Gospel, but is as full as the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Grave," of sepulchral horrors.

Of the costumes we may judge by that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, in "The Digby Plays"—the Apostle is "dressed like an adventurous knight," and is mounted. In place of scene-shifting the audience shifted from one open-air stage in the street to another. There were dances between the scenes. Paul's servant has a scene of banter with an ostler. He maintains that he is a gentleman's servant, a superior person. Says the ostler: "I saw such another gentleman with you, a barrowful he bare of horse dung... and such other gear".

There are forty characters and a crowd in the play of "Mary Magdalene," and much skill in stage management must have been needed. In this play of more than two thousand lines allegorical characters abound, including the Seven Deadly Sins; much of the Gospel story of the Magdalene is introduced, with lively scenes from the unconverted career of the Lady of the Castle of Magdala, and there is a long passage of sheer romance; we have a storm at sea; the abandonment of the King's wife and child on a rock; their discovery later, alive and well—in fact the story is akin to that in Shakespeare's "Pericles".

We see that the secular entertainment, the drama of romance, is ousting its religious occasion and pretext. In "Mary Magdalene," too, we observe that the "Miracle Play" on sacred subjects, is combined with the "Morality," the drama with allegorical characters (as in the "Romance of the Rose"), presented in flesh and blood, and therefore more entertaining than they are in the endless allegorical poems. The Morality of "Everyman" has been revived with much success in our own time. In all these plays the verse takes many rhyming forms, mainly lyric. The chief collections are the Townley, York, Chester, Digby, Coventry, and a Macro (named from an owner of the manuscript). In the Macro play, "Mankind," the actors make collections of money from the audience: they must have belonged to a professional strolling company, not to an honourable and disinterested trading guild. The piece is a gross burlesque of morality, full of blatant jests and dog-Latin rhymes.

There is a scientific Morality, an "Interlude," "The Four Elements," in which Nature, Humanity, Studious Desire, Sensual Appetite, Experience, and Ignorance play their parts. Much novel information about the dimensions of the earth and meteorology is given; Studious Desire is an apt pupil, but Sensual Appetite and the Taverner offer instruction more palatable to "the Man in the Street". They introduce

little Nell
A proper wench, she danceth well,
And Jane with the black lace,
We will have bouncing Bess also.

In "Hickscorner," an interlude of the same kind, the hero has been in as many places as Widsith himself, including

Hickscorner and Free Will are worse roisterers than Humanity, and their rude waggeries make the mirth, though Free Will speaks of forswearing sack and living cleanly.

John Heywood is one of the few known authors of these things; he was of what is now Pembroke College, Dr. Johnson's College, in Oxford, and was an acquaintance of Sir Thomas More, who frankly admits that by nature he was "a giglot," a gay fellow, though, by grace, devout. Heywood was merry in mournful times, when Henry VIII began to make martyrs of Protestants, and of Catholics who were not, at any moment, of the same shade of belief as himself. The anecdotes say that Heywood saved his skin by his jests, that after Henry's death he amused Mary Tudor, who was not easily amused, and that he fled from persecution under Edward VI, and died abroad in the reign of Elizabeth.

His best-known piece is "The Four P's," a Pothecary, Pardoner, Palmer, and Pedlar. Why, asks the Pardoner, should the Palmer visit hundreds of remote shrines, while the Pardoner, at his very door, can sell him forgiveness of sins at the lowest figure? He can cleanse a thousand souls for as small a sum as the Palmer spends on one voyage. All four men are impudent rogues, and all, in the spirit of the Morality, are rapidly converted; the Pedlar becoming as pious as Piers Plowman. There is no action, and the great jest is that, in a lying competition, the Pedlar says that he has never seen "a woman out of patience". The diversion must have been derived mainly from the antics of the players on the stage.

Heywood's "Thersites" (the impudent orator in the "Iliad") was written about 1537, to make mirth for the birth feast of the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VI. Thersites asks Mulciber (Hephæstus) to make him a helmet (sallet) as he made the arms of Achilles. This enables Mulciber to vent many puns on salad; they look like the very first puns ever devised, and occupy two pages. The pun seems to have been a novelty in Tudor England. Thersites is a rough-hewn predecessor of Shakespeare's Pistol. There is much mockery of sacred relics and some buffoonery by way of action. Telemachus brings a letter from Ulysses (such a thing, said J. J. Rousseau, very foolishly, would have been useful in the "Odyssey") and Miles, the Knight, ends all with a pious speech.

In early Tudor England the drama had sunk many fathoms below the level of the Miracle Plays, such as that of the Shepherds. The rise of the drama, under Elizabeth, is a kind of miracle, like the sculpture of Phidias appearing after the rude art of the artists who worked at Athens before the victories of Marathon and Salamis.

In "Jack Juggler," however, we find the influence of Roman comedy faintly dawning, for the play is Plautus's comedy of "Amphitryon," "without Amphitryon," the hero, and with the mischievous and much-beaten Jack Juggler as the source of the fun.

The infant drama had wandered out of Biblical and allegorical subjects into touch with actual ancient Roman comedy, and, with Bale's "King John," was preluding to Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays. In the dawn of the Reformation, disputants on both sides addressed the people in Interludes, just as to-day a person "with a purpose" puts it into a novel, in place of writing a sober and reasonable treatise which would not be read. Among the plays with a purpose none is more absurd than the "King John" of John Bale (1495-1563). Bale, whose best work is a kind of history of English literature in Latin, was a fiery hot gospeller; he had to leave the country under Mary Tudor. In "King John" that profane and licentious but astute prince appears as a kind of Protestant martyr. Attacked by Stephen Langton, he says that the Church hates him because he does not found abbeys, and is in favour of an open Bible. So he is poisoned by the wicked priests!

In the interests of History no less than of her Church, Queen Mary issued proclamations against plays with a Protestant purpose, while Elizabeth was equally severe against Catholic Interludes.

We must think of these Interludes, whether moral, religious, scientific, or amusing, being played from the reign of Henry VIII till the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. Till 1575 or 1576 there were no theatre-houses; stages were erected in halls of palaces, castles, colleges, and in open spaces of towns. The King or Queen had Interlude players in their service, as they had musicians. Companies calling themselves "the Servants," and wearing the liveries of nobles and gentlemen, strolled about the country, protected by their more or less nominal masters, and supporting themselves by their skill in their profession. The "children," that is the boys, of various schools, especially of St. Paul's, acted under the managership of their teachers. The undergraduates of the Universities also acted, at first in Latin, before Queen Elizabeth, who did not conceal her distaste for what did not amuse her. The language of the plays was cast into all sorts of rhyming measures, and "the Vice" or lively buffoon of the Interludes was the germ of the Shakespearean Clown. There was abundance both of writers and players, but the plays had little merit as literature.

Among the unforgotten of these dwellers on the threshold of the Elizabethan drama is "Ralph Roister Doister," by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556) (of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, later headmaster of Eton, and next of Westminster; he died in the reign of Mary Tudor). The Vice, so to speak, or clever buffooning parasite, of the piece is Matthew Merrygreek, who in a long rhyming prologue describes his own way of life and his intention to befool the braggart Ralph Roister Doister. Ralph enters melancholy, he is in love: he has met the lady at supper, but forgets her name. She is rich (says Matthew), a widow, and betrothed to another man. Ralph is a fatuous ass, like Malvolio, and thinks all women in love with him. Merrygreek fools him to the top of his bent, and presents the lady with a forged love-letter from Ralph, who is drubbed by the maid-servants and generally disgraced, while the true love of the heroine returns from a voyage to be happy with her. There is plenty of noise, singing, and beating, and some intrigue in the case of the genuine wooer and his suspicious jealousy.

The equally renowned "Gammer Gurton's Needle," was acted sixteen years after "Ralph Roister Doister," at Christ's College, Cambridge. It is usually attributed to John Still (born 1543) a member of Christ's, Master of Arts in 1565, and later Master of that College, Vice-Chancellor of the University, and finally Bishop of Bath and Wells (died 1608). As Vice-Chancellor, Still was a stickler for Latin plays at Cambridge, which were more educational but not so popular as dramas in English. The plot turns on the loss of a needle by old Gammer Gurton, the suspicion, raised by a wag, that another old woman has stolen it; the search for the needle; combats about the needle, and the final discovery of that implement in the seat of a man's breeches. A sturdy beggar, Diccon, is "the Vice," and sets Gammer Gurton and another gammer to a scolding match. Hodge, a servant, with his broad dialect, and insistent demand for the needle, that a large and unseemly hole which ventilates his breeches may instantly be patched, has perhaps the most comic part, and when somebody slaps Hodge and drives the needle (which had stuck in his breeches), into a safe part of his person, the joy of a Cambridge audience knew no limits. The play is thoroughly rustic, the language is of an amazing breadth, and no doubt the drama made abundant mirth among the Cantab wits. Members of the sister University, where poets have been rare in comparison with these glories of Cambridge, need not covet Still, unless he wrote the famous drinking song in the Second Act, "Back and Side go bare, go bare!"

The Bishop of Bath and Wells probably looked back with mingled feelings on the jolly, noisy achievement of his youth, which has made him immortal, for all have heard of "Gammer Gurton's Needle". It is written in rhyming lines of from fourteen to sixteen syllables.

"The Gammer," though low, is lively; not so is "Gorboduc"; it is a tragedy of unspeakable dullness composed in blank verse which has no merit except that of regularity, the sense usually, though not always, ending at the close of each line. The author, Thomas Sackville, later Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and High Treasurer under James VI and I, was born at Buckhurst, Sussex, in 1536. His grandmother was aunt of Anne Boleyn, so he was a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth. At the Inner Temple, as a young man, he met Thomas Norton, and the pair composed "Gorboduc," which was acted in the Inner Temple in 1561. The authors were inspired by no other Muse than that of Seneca, the moral philosopher, Roman tragedian, and tutor of the Emperor Nero. The play tells how Gorboduc, a mythical King of Britain, abdicated, and, dividing his realm into two parts, gave the country north of the Humber to the younger, and the portion south of the Humber to the elder of his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Each had a kind of tutor, and each had a favourite. They were both discontented, the younger slew the elder son, and the mother of both avenges the elder on the younger of her children. The result was national ruin, in which "Fergus Duke of Albany" (apparently King of Scotland is meant) took an active part. There are very long speeches, no action; a messenger brings the news of the distressing occurrences, and a Chorus moralizes on them. Carried away by grief when his wife murders his surviving boy, Gorboduc pronounces the name of Eubulus with the penultimate syllable short, and expires with decency behind the scenes. Eubulus then utters a political forecast in more than a hundred lines, and the drama concludes.

"Gorboduc" was printed in 1565: translations of Seneca's plays were also being written: George Gascoigne translated a piece named "Jocasta" (the wife of Œdipus) from the Italian, and a prose comedy, "The Supposes" from Ariosto. This great Italian poet and his countrymen adapted to Italian manners the plots and characters which the ancient comic dramatists of Rome, Terence and Plautus, derived from late Greek comedy of everyday life. Thus an element of orderliness in comedy was introduced in England from adaptations of Italian adaptations of Roman copies of late Greek plays. Such stock characters as the austere father, the spendthrift son, the cunning servant, the boastful soldier, the nurse, soft of heart and loose of tongue, invaded the comedy of France, and, to a slighter degree, that of England.

Meanwhile Richard Edwards produced a curious Interlude of a classical nature, "Damon and Pythias," the characters being Greek, Sicilian and English—a dash of buffoonery is mixed with very lamentable matter. The Drama was formless, unable to attain definite shape, till some twenty-five years had passed when we reach the date of the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, such as Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, and the other University young men about town. The influences of the old waggish or controversial Interludes, of the Senecan school of stiffness, and of translations or imitations of Italian comedies, were seething in the cauldron of the age.

CHAPTER XVII.

WYATT AND SURREY. GASCOIGNE. SACKVILLE.

The names of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), are for ever memorable in English poetry, not so much for what they actually achieved as for what they attempted. They abstained from allegory, still lingering in its unlovely dotage, and from doggerel. They wrote of themselves and their own loves, joys, and sorrows, but though their verse is concerned with their personal emotions, these are treated in a conventional way, borrowed from continental poetry. They turned to the Italian sonneteers, especially to Petrarch, and saw afar the dawning of the "Pléiade," the company of French reformers of poetic style and language, Ronsard, du Bellay, and the rest, or at least of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, their predecessor. But both Wyatt and Surrey died young, Wyatt by an unfortunate chance, Surrey as a victim of the jealous tyranny of Henry VIII. The two young poets thus live together in men's memories like the Bion and Moschus of Greece: theirs is "unfulfilled renown".

Wyatt, of a Yorkshire family, was son of Sir Henry Wyatt, of Allington in Kent, a man who had strange vicissitude of fortune in the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII. Thomas went very early to St. John's College, Cambridge, married at 17, was a glory of the Court of Henry VIII, went on diplomatic missions to Italy (Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and Rome), studied Italian literature, was now in favour and now in prison, and made love, with more or less of earnestness, to Anne Boleyn, being fortunate in escaping from the doom of her admirers when Henry VIII took her life. Favoured by Henry's minister, Thomas Cromwell, but detested, and accused of diplomatic misdeeds by Bishop Bonner, Wyatt defended himself with a success then very rare, retired from Court and wrote satires and poems on the advantages of retirement; paraphrased the Seven Penitential Psalms, and died of a fever caught from fatigue and travel, in October, 1542, lamented in verse by Surrey.

The reader of his sonnets, the earliest in English, is amazed to find that we have travelled through so many centuries of the life of English poetry, and only reached lame lines that can scarcely be scanned. Since Chaucer the art of verse had become very dim, perhaps in consequence of the transitional state of the language, the obsolescence of the sound of the final e, and the Anglicizing of the sounds of borrowed French words by throwing back the accent (as in honour for honour, virtue for virtue). Wyatt, when he began to write sonnets, put accents in strange places, and counted syllables on his fingers, content if he could reckon ten of them, in a line. To rhyme "aggrieved" to "wearied," is like the tramp's effort to make "workhouse" rhyme with "sorrow". The young student in a novel of Henri Murger's reads only the rhymes in sonnets. If we study in that way Wyatt's sonnet "The Lover Waxeth Wiser," we find that the last words in the first eight lines are

He usually tried to keep to the Petrarchian arrangement of rhymes in the first eight lines a b b a a b b a, but, contrary to Italian rule, his last two lines were always a rhyming couplet, as in Shakespeare's "Sonnets," in which the Petrarchian model is wholly disregarded. The sonnet thus ends with an emphatic clench, usually moral, while in the Italian sonnet the last six lines resemble the withdrawal of the wave of the first eight lines.

The sonnet, with its concision and its technical difficulties, afforded excellent practice to poets who endeavoured to bring delicacy and order into the chaos and coarseness of verse as written by Skelton and his contemporaries. But a good sonnet is among the rarest of good things, and the mere technical difficulties once overcome, men's minds may turn out sonnets of no value with the rapidity of machine work. The stock character of this kind of poetry, the Lover, with his strange far-fetched conceit in his almost metaphysical refinements, is apt to become as tedious as the old figures of allegory; however, he was a novelty. Wyatt improved with practice in sonnet-making, though such rhymes as "mountains" "fountains," "plains," "remains," are a stumbling-block to the modern reader. But his "And wilt thou leave me thus?" and "Forget not yet the tried intent," with their brief refrains are immortal lyrics, heralding the music of the age of Elizabeth.

His epigrams are not the stinging wasps of verse commonly called epigrams, but are brief poems in the manner of the epigrams of the Greek Anthology. The satires on the Court, based on Italian poems, and including a form of the "Town and Country Mouse," are not in Skelton's violent way, but the work of a gentle man, and the poems in rhyme royal, seven line stanzas, with six syllables to the line, are charming novelties.

The date of Surrey's birth is uncertain: it was four or five years after the battle of Flodden (1513), in which his grandfather—"an auld decrepit carle in a chariot—" was victorious over the fiery James IV. The title Earl of Surrey is a courtesy title, borne by the poet as son of the Duke of Norfolk. He was at least a dozen years younger than his friend Wyatt, and was a lively young courtier, who was made a Knight of the Garter in 1541. He married very early, in 1532, and his famous passion for fair Geraldine may have been merely poetical—the usual story about Geraldine and the magic mirror is derived from a novel of 1554. About 1542 he was imprisoned for a matter of a duel, a challenge at least, and in 1543 went about London at night breaking windows with a stone-bow. He wrote a poem in which he gravely maintains that he was merely punishing the wicked city for her sins. Again released from prison he saw some fighting in France, and, returning, patronized a poet named Churchyard, who later wept unmelodiously above his early tomb. Early in 1546 Surrey had the worse of a battle with the French near Boulogne, was superseded by the Earl of Hertford, and, in January, 1547, was accused of a sort of heraldic high treason (quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor, who, of course, had never heard of armorial bearings), and executed, shortly before the death of the tyrant, Henry VIII.

Surrey's versification, especially in the sonnet, is much superior to that of Wyatt, but he is less apt to keep to the rules of rhyme, in the first eight lines; indeed he writes in the form of Shakespeare's sonnets. His "Prisoned in Windsor" is a pleasant picture of a young gallant's life, who takes his eye off the ball at Tennis to watch the ladies in the dedans: hunts, tilts, and makes friends. The moral poems in lines of fourteen feet are of no great merit, but Surrey's translation of the Second Book of the Æneid is the first English example of blank verse, borrowed from Italian practice. The lines are stiff and hard; and the main merit is the novelty, the first birth of the measure that was to become, in forty years, "Marlowe's mighty line".

The poems of Wyatt and Surrey were not published till long after the deaths of the authors, when they appeared, with many other pieces, in "Tottel's Miscellany". Other writers represented there are Nicholas Grimald, with his jog-trot metre, the "poulter's" or poulterer's measure of from twelve to fourteen syllables to the dozen—so were eggs sold by a custom of the trade. Surrey's retainer, Thomas Churchyard, a man very busy with sword and pen, was also a writer in the "Miscellany"; and indeed was a literary hack-of-all-work. There came, after the brief gleam of sunshine that fell on Wyatt and Surrey, another generation of wooden versifiers and translators, with whose names, Tusser the bucolic, Phaer, Golding, Googe, and Whetstone, it is hardly necessary to fill the page and burden the memory. They may be studied by the curious, but they wrought no deliverance. To generations which possess superabundance of versifiers and no great poets, these barren years are a kind of consolation. For reasons not to be discovered there are such periods in the literary life of all nations, as in England between Pope and Cowper.

The versifiers in "Tottel's Miscellany" keep harping unmelodiously on the strings of Surrey and Wyatt, many of their pieces are complimentary addresses to ladies, or laments on the deaths of friends. Poor conceits are twisted and tormented; there is hardly any promise of advance; we scarcely hear any of the bird-like musical notes with which the later part of the reign of Elizabeth sang so wondrously.

George Gascoigne (1525 (?)-1577) was an interesting character. He was a Cambridge man, a member of the Society of Gray's Inn, a poet who, like Scott, composed his verses in the saddle: a Member of Parliament who was opposed as "a common rhymer... noted for manslaughter... a notorious Ruffian," and even a spy, certainly he owed debts, and was disinherited by his father. He wrote on woodmanship, but was apt to forget to shoot at the deer that came within range of his cross-bow. As a captain in the Low Countries he and his command were surprised and taken by the Spaniards: he came home, published his Posies (1575) and, he says, got not a penny by the venture: he then wrote "The Steel Glass," a kind of satire, the mirror of the age, in blank verse, and next wrote in common ballad measure the long and amazingly prosaic "Complaint of Philomene".

In 1572 Gascoigne published "A Hundred Sundry Flowers, bound up in one small Posy". The long title sets forth that some of the flowers were culled in the gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, and Ariosto, others are from English orchards. The native flowers are the sweeter and more fair. While our poets were turning into stiff measures the sonnets of Italy, Gascoigne could write so naturally and melodiously his own English, as in his "Lullaby of a Lover".

Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.

Beneath the stiff borrowed phrases and metres there was always this native and tuneful spirit of unsophisticated song.

In 1575 he was a maker of words for the Masques at Leicester's famous reception of Elizabeth at Kenilworth (see the novel of that name, where Scott calmly introduces Shakespeare as already a successful dramatist). He satirized drunkards: we have already seen that he translated a tragedy, "Jocasta," from the Italian; he wrote a love story in rhyme of a personal kind, and his brief "Instructions" is the earliest English work, in no way indebted to Aristotle, on the Art of Poetry. As he also translated, we have seen, a comedy from the Italian, and a prose tale, a kind of work later fashionable, Gascoigne may be regarded as an intrepid explorer in many fields of literature. "He first beat the path to that perfection which our best poets have aspired to since his departure," says Nash (1589). "He brake the ice for our quainter poets that now write," says Tofte (1615). But the path as trodden by this pioneer continued to be rough. Gascoigne was an example of the versatility and literary ambition which many young gentlemen displayed in the age of Elizabeth; mingling poetry and study and serious thought with their gallant adventures in love, diplomacy, war, and travel.

His "Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse in English" is a very brief pamphlet. He quotes "my master, Chaucer" against alliterative "thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff," but mentions no other poet. Be original, he says, if you sing of a lady do not applaud her "crystal eye" or "cherry lip," which Spenser did not disdain, for these things are trite and obvious. The great matter is "to avoid the uncomely customs of common writers," says this "common rhymer". Do not use "obscure and dark phrases in a pleasant sonnet". Do not wander out of your "Poulters measure" metre into lines of thirteen syllables. Give every word its natural emphasis: do not make treasure into treasure. Chaucer is to be followed as a master of prosody. You should write:—

There follows advice on the caesura, and all this counsel shows that, in the early years of Elizabeth, versification was at a very low ebb.

In practice, Gascoigne did not always shine. There are few passages of interest in the stiff blank verse of his "Steel Glass" (the mirror that does not flatter). The best passage, and it is very good, describes the labourer,

Behold him, priests, and though he stink of sweat,
Disdain him not, for shall I tell you what?
Such climb to heaven before the shaven crowns,

feed with fruits of their great pains
Both king and knight and priests in cloister pent.

It would be cruel to quote "Philomene," no stall-ballad creeps more tardily on a longer road than Gascoigne in his tale of her who sings, in a later poet's words,

Who hath remembered thee, who hath forgotten?
They have all forgotten, oh summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.

The poetry of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) is not to be found in his dull tragedy, "Gorboduc," but in his contributions to a vast and once popular collection, "The Mirror for Magistrates". This work is intended to admonish men in power by rhymed histories of the falls of English peers and princes. This was the plan of Chaucer's Monk, in "The Monk's Tale," which that sound critic, the Host, could not long endure. The model was Boccaccio's work on "The Falls of Princes," Englished by Lydgate. The enterprise started by Baldwin and others in 1554-1559, suggests a dread lest English verse should return to Lydgate in the den of Giant Despair, and take up with sepulchral solemnity the tale of tragedies from the darkest days of the unfortunate ancient Britons. A mammoth compilation was gradually evolved, for doleful matter was not far to seek, but Sackville's two contributions, the "Induction," and the "Complaint of Buckingham"—the Buckingham executed under Richard III,—alone concern us.

In the "Induction" the poet describes the gloom of winter, and, in the mediaeval way, dwells long on the constellations. As he muses, he is met by a very deplorable female form—

She proclaims herself to be Sorrow, a goddess, and guides Sackville "to the grisly lake" of Avernus, over which no fowl may fly and live. A number of rueful figures of allegory are encountered, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Old Age, and Sleep, and these are drawn with abundant vigour and variety. The stanza on Sleep gives the measure of the versification, which is rapid, concise, various, sustained, and in its music heralds the arrival of Spenser.

The body's rest, the quiet of the heart,
The travail's care, the still night's frere was he,
And of our life on earth the better part,
Reiver of sight, and yet in whom we see
Things oft that tide, and oft that never be,
Without respect, esteeming equally
King Croesus' pomp and Irus' poverty.

One stanza in the description of the home of the dead seems to have been suggested by famous lines in the Eleventh Book of the "Odyssey".

The "Induction" ends with the appearance of the spirit of Buckingham, who not only tells his own tragedy at great length, and in full historical detail, but introduces several other ancient tragedies, those of Cyrus, Cambyses, Brutus, Cassius, Besseus, Alexander the Great, Clitus, Phalaris, Pheræus, Camillus, and Hannibal. From these fallen princes we drop to

who betrayed his master. Banastaire is then cursed in eleven stanzas. "May Banastaire live to the age of eighty, and then be tried for theft. May his eldest son expire in a pig-sty; his second son be strangled in a puddle, and his daughter be smitten by leprosy."

It cannot be denied that this tragedy, including as it does the murder of the Princes in the Tower, is rather too rich in terrible components, and does not, especially when Banastaire is being dealt with, affect us in the same measure as Dante's pictures of the Inferno. On the whole it is the manner, not the matter, of Sackville that contains more than mere promise: his management of the stanza and of the music of the line is far in advance of anything that had come from an English pen since the death of Chaucer. As for the gloom and horror, these were congenial to a people which, since the burning of the Maid of France (1431), had seen an endless sequence of violence, murder, martyrdoms, and massacres of peers, Princes, Queens, Bishops, and humble folk.

CHAPTER XVIII.

PROSE OF THE RENAISSANCE.

A great, indeed an inestimable influence in literature at this juncture, was that of the long-forgotten Greek language, Greek poetry, and Greek philosophy. When Erasmus, who then had little Greek, arrived in England and visited Oxford (1499), he found there Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet, who had acquired Greek on the continent; and, with Sir Thomas More, were already competent classical scholars. But their Greek learning was mainly turned into the channel of theology, the study of the sources of Christian doctrine, the New Testament, the Greek Fathers; and they were attracted by the philosophy of Plato which appeared to "utter a Christian voice" much more clearly than do the writings of the idol of the Middle Ages, Aristotle.

Greek, however, does not visibly affect the poetic literature of England much, before the date of Spenser, about 1580. The violent times of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor were not favourable to severe study and exquisite appreciation of the Greek genius, a most desirable corrective of the prolixity of mediaevalism, and of the English passion for horrors in stage plays. To most people knowledge of the contents of the Greek classics came through translations, and these translations, as in the case of the historian Thucydides, were done from French versions, while Plato was read through Italian commentators, much influenced by Plato's disciples in early Christian times, the Neoplatonists, dreamers of beautiful dreams concerning things that cannot be uttered.

Study produced also a very wide acquaintance with Greek mythology—Shakespeare's humblest characters have heard of many a Grecian fable—yet the spirit, the exquisite balance, and the refinement of the Greek genius, hardly affected our authors. We may detect it in More's (1478-1535) "Utopia," where the adventurers carry with them to "Nowhere" a "pretty fardel," or parcel, of the cheap neat Greek books printed by Aldus. The fancied State of Utopia, with its comfortable communism and perfect freedom in religion, is derived from the "Republic" of Plato, and in religion is more liberal than, in his later work, "The Laws," he would have permitted it to be. But the "Utopia," written in Latin, was meant for the learned.

Though the "Utopia" was published in 1516, and became famous in Europe, it did not reach unlearned English readers till an English translation, by Ralph Robynson, appeared in 1551. They now had More's eloquent advocacy of communism before them as regulated in his imaginary state, with a Six Hours' Day, universal training of men and women for war, and habit of assassinating the leaders of hostile nations. There is tolerance of all religions which accept a deity and the immortality of the soul: atheists are disqualified for public offices.

In his English works on religious and social controversy, which are little read, More is not only a Catholic and a Conservative, but in discussion is given to abusive and violent language which would have horrified the courteous Plato, the urbane Aristotle, and that model of a devout and ardent student, and perfect gentleman, Pico della Mirandola, whose Life More gave in English. On both sides the controversialists of the Reformation delighted in violent personal abuse, in some Greek orators they found examples of that art. The first effect of Greek in England, by producing a new Biblical criticism and an attack on the foundations of the mediaeval Church, was to "bring not peace but a sword," the wars of religion.

No man did more for the intelligence of Greek than Sir Thomas Elyot (1499 1546)1 author of "The Governour," a long treatise, on the education of a gentleman, and on the nature of forms of government. Elyot bubbles over with Greek, and translates such passages of Homer as he quotes into English verse, the alternate lines rhyming. He is of the Greek opinion that a gentleman should be taught, if he has a taste for art, to draw, paint, and execute works in sculpture, not as a base professional artist, but as an amateur.[1] Elyot would have a boy, at 7 years old, begin with Greek, learning it through Latin, which he picks up, with French, in conversation. Grammars of Greek are now almost innumerable. Grammar, he says with much truth, "if it be made too long and exquisite to the learner, in a manner mortifieth his courage. And by that time he cometh to the most sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of fervent desire of learning is soon quenched with the burden of grammar." Elyot would start his pupil as early as possible with what will interest a child, Æsop's Fables in Greek, and then pass to Lucian, who is amusing as well as elegant. "But I fear me to be too long from noble Homer, from whom as from a fountain proceeded all eloquence and learning." Throughout, Elyot wishes first to interest the pupil; but where, he asks, is he to find qualified schoolmasters? They were as cruel as in the days of St. Augustine, and while Elyot's system of education, in sports as well as in books, is free and joyous, like that of Gargantua in Rabelais, little boys were suffering the horrors described by Agrippa d'Aubigné in his Memoirs. Elyot translated works of Isocrates, Plutarch, and others, wrote a medical work "The Castle of Health," was clerk of the Privy Council, and went on various diplomatic missions. Elyot was not a professional instructor of youth: he was, it seems, educated privately, and of neither university; what pleases us in him is his unstaled zest for learning, his fresh enthusiasm.

The best English of the age and the most durable is that of Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) as we read it in the Liturgy of the Church of England, while much of the merit of King James's Authorized Version of the Bible rests on the foundation of Miles Coverdale's translation (1488-1568). How easy it is to translate the Bible into English which is not a marvel of diction and rhythm, we are too frequently reminded by the Revised Version.

Roger Ascham (1515-1568) was a Yorkshire man of the middle classes, who lived by his learning, and did not find that it paid him as well as he wished. Going early to St. John's College, Cambridge, he was a pupil of the famous Sir John Cheke, who introduced the English way of pronouncing Greek. It is certainly wrong—no people pronounce the vowels as we do; but if Cheke resisted the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, perhaps he is not much to be blamed. Ascham obtained a Fellowship and a Readership in Greek, the Fellowship he lost when he married: he did not long retain his tutorship to the Princess Elizabeth; as secretary to an ambassador in Germany he continued to teach Greek to his chief; and in his letters, Latin or English, we find him often in straits for money and begging for assistance. Camden, writing under James I, says that he lost money at dicing, and in his attack on gambling, in his "Toxophilus," a dialogue on Archery (1545), Ascham shows a rather unholy knowledge of all the tricks on the dice-board. Probably he had paid for his education. He contemplated a work on the noble sport of cock fighting, on which, of course, there was betting, and perhaps Ascham was not in all respects so severe a Puritan as in his unworthy attacks on that noblest of romances, "The Morte d'Arthur". Sir Lancelot is a better gentleman than many who were to be met at a cock fight. Ascham had little sympathy with the Italian influences that were so potent in Elizabethan literature. Italy was certainly profligate and luxurious,

was an English translation of an Italian proverb. Ascham, like his contemporaries, was nothing if not patriotic. The bow of yew and the grey goose shaft had won many a victory over Scots and French, as in "Toxophilus," Ascham reminds these peoples; therefore he desired that archery should be universally practised. But the harquebus, a musket lighter than the heavy hand gun of the fifteenth century, was already, in disciplined hands, more than a match for the bow.

"Toxophilus," to our age, appears pedantic. We have endless classical examples, and learn that the Trojans drew the bow-string only to the breast, not the ear (which is true), while they used iron arrow-heads as against the bronze arrow-heads of the Greeks, a fact not so certain. When he does come to practice, Ascham's teaching in archery is reckoned sound and good. His ideas are summed up in the prayer that the English