Chapter XII: Part 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SKELTON.

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

Mine homely rudeness and dryness.

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

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

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

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

Puttenham was the first critic who prized Skelton cheaply; the artificial and courtly critic of Elizabeth's reign could not rightly estimate such a wild and irregular genius. The critic's fastidious ear listens to nothing but the jar of rude rhymes, while the courtier's delicacy shrinks from the nerve of appalling satire. "Such," says this critic, "are the rhymes of Skelton, usurping the name of a Poet Laureat, being indeed but a rude rayling rhimer, and all his doings ridiculous--pleasing only the popular ear." This affected critic never suspected "the pith" of "the ridiculous;" the grotesque humour covering the dread invective which shook a Wolsey under his canopy. Another Elizabethan critic, the obsequious Meres, re-echoes the dictum. These opinions perhaps prejudiced the historian of our poetry, who seems to have appreciated them as the echoes of the poet's contemporaries. Yet we know how highly his contemporaries prized him, notwithstanding the host whom he provoked. One poetical brother[3] distinguishes him as "the Inventive Skelton," and we find the following full-length portrait of him by another:--[4]

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

* * * * *

And to the hateful minde,
That did disdaine his doings still,
A scorner of his kinde.

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

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

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

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

Seldom out of prince's grace.

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

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

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

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

To bear in hand, therein to read,

and he translated Diodorus Siculus--

Six volumes engrossed, it doth contain.

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

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

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

The mad mummyng
Of Elynour Rummyng,--

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

----In a bravado,
Spent many a crusado.

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

[2] Sterne.

[3] Henry Bradshaw. "Warton," iii. 13.

[4] Thomas Churchyard.

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

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

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

[8] Roscoe's "Lorenzo de' Medici," i. 290.

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

THE SHIP OF FOOLS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

[2] One of these, a "Dialogue between a Citizen and Uplandishman,"
has been reprinted by the Percy Society, under the editorship of Mr.
Fairholt, who has given a digest of the other Eclogues in a
Preface.--ED.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF SIR THOMAS MORE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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