The English Chaucerians - Lydgate to Skelton

From George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature

Book IV: The Fifteenth Century, Chapter I: 

THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS—LYDGATE TO SKELTON

Contempt for fifteenth century literature - Lydgate - Occleve - Bokenam - Audelay and Minors - Hawes - The Pastime of Pleasure - The Example of Virtue - Barclay - The Ship of Fools - The Eclogues - Skelton - His life - His poems





Contempt for fifteenth century literature

 Few sections of English Letters have been more abused or more disdained than the literature, and especially the purely English poetry, of the fifteenth century. The contemptuous ignorance of M. Taine extended even to the Scottish poets, who have been more generally excepted from condemnation; and less excusable under-valuation has been made by critics, at least to the language born, such as Mr. Lowell and Mr. Lounsbury. Even those who do not commit the unpardonable or inexplicable error of belittling or ignoring Dunbar and Henryson have usually a short shrift and a long drop for the English writers of the time, and especially for the English poets.

Of these disdains literary history knows nothing; and nothing is to be passed over by her unless it is at once devoid of intrinsic attraction, and of no importance as supplying connections and origins. Even from the first point of view, slighting of the Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, of the Testament of Cressid, of the King's Quair, of Malory and Berners, of the Nut-browne Maid,  and the carol "I sing of a maiden," must convict the slighter either of invincible bad taste, or of ignorance that cannot be too soon corrected. From the second, the period which shows us the progress in, and the final stoppage of, the blind alley of alliteration, the strange failure to make the improvement that might have been expected on the magnificent advantages given by Chaucer, the process, slow but sure, of elaborating the machinery and amassing the capital of English prose, the probable beginning of the ballad, the spread and popularising in the drama (1), and the certain and glorious ending of romance, need not be ashamed of itself in any company which knows and observes the laws of literary history.

   (1) For reasons given post it has seemed better to reserve the dramatic matter, which might have made some appearance even earlier, and has a fair claim to a place here, for the next Book, so far as the main text is concerned. See also Interchapters iii. (supra) and iv. (infra).

The poets, both Scotch and English, of this century were wont to leash with Chaucer and Gower in the triplet of masters whom they acknowleded and hailed with reverence John Lydgate the "Monk of Bury." Very little is known of the life of this voluminous, somewhat undistinguished, but by no means unpleasant or uninteresting writer, who has had decidedly hard measure in the way of presentation to modern readers, though the Early English Text Society has begun to devote a portion of its too small resources and its too largely drawn upon labour to the task (2). The latest certain date in his life is 1446. As the dates of his orders are—sub-deacon, 1389; deacon, 1393; and priest, 1397, he may have been born about 1370. He appears to have enjoyed the advantages of the three greatest European Universities of his day — Oxford, Paris, and Padua — and his knowledge both of ancient and modern literature must have been pretty complete for the time. He taught rhetoric at Bury St. Edmunds, and it must be remembered that Rhetoric, which had for many centuries, legitimately or illegitimately, extended itself in the sense of the Art of Prose Literature, had by this time absorbed poetics likewise, and that in the fifteenth century especially "rhetorkie" and (in French) rhétoriqueur are words almost interchangeable with "poetry" and "poet." Unluckily, as from the days of Martianus Capella (3) downwards rhetoric and ornate diction had been closely connected, this also became confounded with poetry, and the main objection to fifteenth-century verse next to, or indeed, connected with, its prolixity and dulness, is its addiction to "aureate" terms — that is, bombastic classical or pseudo-classical phraseology. 

      (2) Until this reissue, which has already given the Temple of Glass and other things, was begun, Halliwell's edition of the Minor Poems for the Percy Society, and the Story of Thebes, and some smaller pieces given by Chalmers in his Chauceriana, formed the accessible Lydgate, illustrated by four and twenty pages of bibliography, which Ritson devotes in his Bibliographia Poetica  (London, 1802) to "this voluminous, prosaick, and drivelling monk," as the critic, with his usual sweetness, describes his subject.
     (3) This crabbed, but to fit tastes not unpleasant writer paints the breast of Rhetoric as exquisitissimis gemmarum coloribus balteatum, gives her arms which clash velut fulgoreae nubis fragore colliso bombis dissultantibus, and assigns to her a vox aurata — all transparent allegory.

Lydgate 

In this Lydgate is not quite such a sinner as some of his contemporaries and still more his successors. He could now and then catch something at least of the propriety of language which is one of his master Chaucer's glories, and he was also less to seek than any other of that master's purely English followers in versification, though he too shows some signs of that curious confusion of poetic tongue which came upon his time.

The early printers, Caxton, Pynson, and Wynkyn de Worde, in whose time Lydgate still ranked as one of the di majores  of English literature, were not unkind to him; but the mania for early printed books as such has made these editions entirely inaccessible, save in public libraries, to the lover of literature who is not a millionaire. Fortunately, the pieces noted above appear to be very fair specimens of his work, much of the current abuse of which is only an echo of the violence of Ritson, a critic seldom to be undervalued when he praises, but too often merely to be neglected when he blames. The Thebes poem, which was obviously intended as a pendant to the Knight's Tale, gives the more canonical history of the wars which are taken for granted as precedent in Chaucer's poem, consists of between four and five thousand verses in couplets (vide infra), and begins as a Canterbury Tale with a prologue, reference to Ospringe and other localities, and an invitation by the host to "Dan John" to tell it. In this piece the characters of Statius and those of Boccaccio are both drawn upon, and the story is sufficiently well told, though with too many speeches and involutions, and with little share of Chaucer's orderly and artful action. The most noteworthy thing about it, however, as about most of the poetry of Lydgate, of Occleve, and even of Hawes, not to mention smaller men, is that strange loss of "grip" in versification which has been more than once referred to. How far is this due to careless or ignorant copying or printing cannot be said with confidence until a much larger amount of Lydgate's enormous work has been competently edited from the MSS.; but it is very improbable that this can ever be made to bear the whole blame or any large part of it.  The truth would rather seem to be that Chaucer was too far in advance of his time both in ear and in perception of the capabilities of language; that his followers, while ignorant of the real powers of the decasyllable, improperly attributed to it that license real powers of the decasyllable, improperly attributed to it that license of shortening as well as lenghtening by equivalence; or else that they were bewildered by the old go-as-you-please liberty of alliterative rhythm, while the consfusion was worse confounded by rapid and uncertain changes of pronunciation and accentuation in the language, as English finally shook off all dependence upon French, as its dialects mixed and blended, and as other influences were brought to bear. Certain it is that in Lydgate, still more in Occleve, and more or less in all the others of this chapter, while the line sometimes loses all rhythmical sufficiency, though it does yield ten syllables to the finger, it at any other time fails to respond even to this mechanical test, and it simply sprawls — a frank and confessed nondescript or failure.

     (1) If Lydgate is really responsible for the following lines in an account of Henry VI.'s entry into London (Minor Poems, p. 3), no bathos and no bad verse can have been inaccessible to him—
            Their clothing was of colour full convenable:
                 The noble Mayor clad in red velewet (!)
            The Sheriffs, the Aldermen, full notable,
                  In furrèd clokys the colour scarlett.
Observe that "in furrèd clokys, scarlet in colour," is an obvious change, and makes a very fair line.

These faults appear, but somewhat less, in the Complaint of the Black Knight and the other smaller poems caught in the great "Chauceriana" net. The rhyme-royal of the Complaint seems to have acted as a sort of support and stay to the backboneless writers of this time. In the other shorter poems, and in the pleasant piece of London Lickpenny —which is one of Lydgate's best and best-known things, and which describes the woes of a penniless (or one-pennied) man in Westminster Hall and in London shops and streets — there is naturally much more variety and liveliness than in the longer and more conventional efforts. Not that there is a lack of convention even here. It is exceedingly rash to take the confessions of youthful follies and peccadilloes which Lydgate makes in his Testament, just as Occleve does in his Male Règle, and many other poems of this and other ages elsewhere, for solid biographical documents. The chief of Lydgate's other works are the Temple of Glass, the very title of which is redolent of fifteenth-century allegory; the Falls of Princes, perhaps his most popular book in his own day, adapted from Boccaccio, and itself serving as model to the famous miscellany of the Mirror for Magistrates in the sixteenth century; a Troy Book, one of the numerous versions of Guido Colonna's plagiarism from Benoît de Sainte-More; Proverbs; the Court of Sapience; a Life of Our Lady; a Chronicle of English Kings; Lives of his patron at Bury St. Edmunds; and so forth. These are but a few of the enormous number of works attributed to him. But the general value of Lydgate is not hard to fix. He is a scholar, not a master, a versifier rather than a poet; an interesting figure in a time of groping and transition, and perhaps not so very unlike other figures in other times. 

 Occleve

Thomas Occleve (1) (there seems to be as good authority for this as for the somewhat uglier form "Hoccleve") is, and probably will continue to be, inseparably connected in literary history with Lydgate, of whom he is a rather less voluminous and rather less accomplished double. He was often given to autobiographic details of the preciser kind, and from two of these we gather that he must have been born about 1368 (where is guesswork, the nearest locality in spelling bein Hockliffe in Bedfordshire). He entered the Privy Seal Office when he was about twenty, and we have abundant records of payments to him for parchment, ink, and wax used, as well as of salaries and pensions. He was always expecting a beneficy or "corrody" (annuity charged on ecclesiastical revenues); but nothing came till 1424, when he was quartered, to an extent not exactly defined, on the Priory of Southwick in Hampshire. We may have something of his as late as 1448, and he may have died a little later, say 1450.

(1) The first volume of an edition of him has been issued by the E.E.T.S. under Dr. Furnivall's editorship.

Occleve's  principal work is an English version or adaptation in rhyme-royal of one or more Latin originals, under the title of De Regimine Principum (2), preceded by a long introduction, partly autobiographic and wholly moralising. The enthusiastic address to his "master dear" Chaucer, of whom, be it remembered, one of his MSS. preserves the most probably authentic portrait, is the most interesting thing in this lugubrious and desultory work, of which the versification frequently sprawls and staggers in a fashion beside which even Lydgate's is well girt and neatly moving.

(2) Edited for the Roxburghe Club by Wright in 1860.

Among the smaller pieces attention has chiefly been given to the above referred to piece, entitled La Male Règle de T. Occleve, which seems to have been written when the poet was coming to forty years, after which age of wisdom, however, he married — for love, he says. This poem has the invariable characteristics of such regrets for lost youth, together with the less usual peculiarity that the poet represents himself as not merely a ne'er-do-well, but a very poor creature — a valetudinarian, "letting I dare not wait upon would" in his very escapades, a coward, a glutton, vain, weak, lazy, but with none of the nobler vices. If the thing had been better done we might have taken it for his humour; but the poorness of the verse (3), with a Chaucerian flash or two such as —

Excess-at-board has laid his knife with me,

is rather a warrant for truth. 

(3) Occleve, says Dr. Furnivall, "is content so long as he can count the syllables on his fingers." This is generous rather than severe.

A singularly weak Complaint of Our Lady before the Cross, where the subject strikes no spark out of Occleve's flabby nature; a feebly violent onslaught on Sir John Oldcastle and the Lollards; certain ballades, pious or political, which are no ballades at all, Occleve being apparently too weak to keep up to the rhyme-and-refrain scheme, may be noticed. The Letter of Cupid to Lovers is a little better. Not so much can be said of Occleve's Complaint and Occleve's Dialogue, though the latter may have an attraction for some in its querulous garrulity. But the tale which it introduces — a versification from the Gesta Romanorum about the emperor Jereslaus's wife — and a later Story of Jonathas, are not bad of their kind, while the poem which comes between them, and which is connected with all that have been mentioned since the Complaint, is, like most of the work of this time and of this poet, merely a translation, though of what original is not quite certain. But there is a much healthier and manlier tone in it than in the puling regrets of the Male Rèle for wated health and feeble follies gone. The fifteenth century thought much of Death, and the thought was here, as elsewhere, tonic. The whining poltroon of the retrospect of life faces the prospect of death with no sham philosophy, and if not without fear, yet in humility and faith.


Bokenam

For those, and perhaps only for those, who desire to appreciate at first hand the strange paralysis of humour and harmony, of grace and strength, which came upon the successors of Chaucer and Langland, it may be worth while to turn over the work of Osbern Bokenam (= probably Buckenham) (1), whose Legends of the Saints, in some 10,000 lines of decasyllables variously arranged in Chaucerian fashions, have had the very undeserved honour of two reprints (2), chiefly, it would seem, because they represent the not very common dialect of Suffolk. Bokenam, who, as we learn from a note in the MS., was a Suffolk man, a Doctor of Divinity, and an Austin Friar of Stoke Clare, tells the lives of Saints Margaret, Anne, Christina, the Eleven Thousand, Faith, Agnes, Dorothy, Mary Magdalene, Katharine, Cecily, Agatha (3), Lucy, and Elizabeth of Hungary, in verse of rather more smoothness than some of his contemporaries could manage, but of a saltlessness, an absence of flavour, sparkle, piquncy, bite, which is desperate and almost inconceivable. Not St. Margaret and the Dragon, not St. Katharine and the Wheel, not even that lovely legend of St. Dorothea, which might draw poetry from an expert in phonetics, can inspire Bokenam with anything beyond the mildest prettiness of expression, and this he very seldom reaches. The most interesting thing in the whole book is the statement in the same end-note that Thomas Burgh had the poem copied in Cambridge in the year of Our Lord 1447, at the cost of thirty shillings — which sum can seldom have been either worse spent or more hardly earned either by town or gown in that locality.

(1) "Dr. Bokenaham of Bury" occurs, however, in Roger North.
(2) By Stevenson for the Roxburghe Clu, and by Horstmann (Heilbronn, 1883).
(3) "Agas" in the English, a form identical with the original of "haggis."

Audelay and Minors

Indeed, after making every allowance for the attempts, estimable if not delectable, of Lydgate and Occleve to keep English poetry alive during the first half of the fifteenth century, it is impossible not to be struck, not merely with the extremely moderate success of their own efforts, but with the paucity of any attempt to support them among their contemporaries. What we may call the Apocrypha of Piers Plowman, the Creed, and the Tale (vide supra) may belong to the beginning of this century as well as to the end of the last. So may the verses of the Shropshire poet, Audelay (1), who, like Langland himself, was a reformer without being a Wyclifite. To the first quarter of the fifteenth century belong William of Nassington, a Yorkshire writer of sacred verse, who perhaps belongs to the tradition of Hampole; and Hugh Campden, another translator, the author of the moral romance of Boctus and Sidrac. The hapless Prince Edward, son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou, before Clarence stabbed him in the field by Tewkesbury, underwent the minor pain of having a moral poem on the Active Policy of a Prince wwritten for him by a certain George Ashby., Clerk of the Signet to his mother, and an aged Chaucerian. One of Caxton's books is a verse translation of Cato's Morals, by Benedict Burgh, done about 1470; and the last quarter saw some curious alchemical verses by Geroge Ripley and Thomas Norton. But this, and perhaps a little more of the same kind, purely curious and appealing only to the robuster kind of curiosity, is all that bridges in England the space between Lydgate and Ocleve in the early part of the century, and Hawes and Skelton in the beginning of the sixteenth. There is, it is true, some anonymous matter of far greater interest which may represent this interval, and which will be dealt with in a later chapter. But even this is scanty in amount (2).

(1) Ed. Halliwell, Percy Society, 1844. A selection only. The MS. is dated 1426, and Audelay lived and wrote as late as the reign of Henry VI. He has "bob and wheel" stanzas, sometimes alliterated and sometimes not. Romance sixains, a system composed of triplet octosyllables separated by sible lines, monorhymed throughout the poem, etc.
(2) I know the writers mentioned in this paragraph, after Audelay and Nassington, only at second hand.

Hawes

 Very little is known of Stephen Hawes, and that little does not include the date either of his birth or of his death. He is said to have been a gentleman of birth, an Oxford man, a pretty considerable traveller, a master of modern languages, a man of great memory (seeing he could repeat by heart the works of Lydgate), and the possessor of a critical faculty somewhat smaller, inasmuch as he made that voluminous person equal in some respects with Geoffrey Chaucer. It is said with probability that he was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII.; he certainly wrote verses to congratulate Henry VIII. on his accession; and it seems likely that he died in Suffolk in early middle age, certainly before 1530, and probably about 1523.

The Pastime of Pleasure

Wykyn de Wrode printed collections of the poems of Hawes — the Pastime of Pleasure, by which he is now almost solely known, in 1509, with some more pieces and the Example of Virtue in 1512. The Pastime was reprinted by Wright for the Percy Society (1845), unluckily with some omissions. Mr. Arber's long-promised reprint of his other poems has, still more unfortunately, never appeared. But the text of the Pastime, and the abstract of the Example contained in Professor Henry Morley's English Writers (vii. 75-81), make an estimate easy enough. 

Hawes has been said to belong to "The Provençal school," a statement of course entirely erroneous, and due to the confusion between Provençal and French, which was at one time excusable, but has long ceased to be so. He is, in fact, a Chaucerian who has deepened one particular colour of Chaucerism by recurrence to the Romance of the Rose itself, and still more to the heavier following of its allegory in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by French and English writers. The Pastime of Pleasure, or the history of Graund-Amour and La Bel Pucell, is, like Gavin Douglas's contemporary King Hart, simply an allegory of the life of man. The hero passes the meadow of youth; chooses the path of Active Life, neglecting the Contemplative or Monastic; is introduced to the Seven Daughters of Doctrine (the Trivium and Quadrivium); meets La Bel Pucell, determines to obtain her, but is exposed to some danger by the misguidance of a comic slanderer of women, Godfrey Gobilive; destroys a three-headed giant and non-descript monster, so forcing his way to La Bel Pucell; is received by the Virtues, and married to his beloved by Law. He lives happily with her till Age strikes him with infirmities and the vice of Avarice. Contrition comes in time, however, before Death, and he is buried by Mercy and Charity and epitaphed by Fame.

Thus presented in its bare scheme or skeleton, the poem may well seem (to use a Drydenian phrase) but a cool and insignificant thing. Nothing is more dead to us, hardly anything perhaps seems more certain of no resurrection, than this bald yet childish form of allegory, which lacks alike the vivid passages, the attractive, dreamlike transformations, and the fiery internsity of Langland, the gorgeous romance of Spenser and his perfect poetic skill, the amiable humanity and vivid novel-interest of Bunyan. In the two last of these cases —perhaps even in the first — the allegory, though ever present, is present in the background; it will come when called, but does not obtrude itself; in Hawes it is pitilessly obtrusive at every step. Further, the poet is singularly ill-provided with the means of his art. He is far from being such a "dull dog" as Occleve; he has perhaps more flashes of poetry than Lydgate. But either the venerable Wynkyn was false to the central principle of all good printing, "Follow copy even if it flies out of the window," or else Hawes was less able to keep up any standard of correct and musical versification than even these his predecessors. Both his rhymes-royal and his couplets (both are used in the Pastime) are suject to the strangest lapses, to fits of a kind of verse-giddiness or epilepsy.

The Example of Virtue

The Example of Virtue, entirely, it would seem, in rhyme-royal, appears from the abstract above referred to be even more nakedly allegoridc than the Pastime of Pleasure. The usual invocation of the unequal three — Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate — is followed by the usual dream. Youth is escorted by Discretion, voyages over the sea of Vain Glory to an island where are the castles of Justice, Nature, Fortune, Courage, and Wisdom; is engaged to Cleanness; is tempted by Lust, Avarice, and Pride; fights with a three-headed dragon (Hawes cannot spare the three-headed dragons); is new dubbed by Virtue;  marries Cleanness, and is finally translated with her to Heaven. The three are once more invoked, and the poem ends. Of course, in both these poems there is a certain faint adumbration of the Faërie Queen —its outline without its glorious filling-in, its theme without its art, its intellectual reason for existence without any of its aesthetic justification thereof. 

It is not improbable that Spenser did know Hawes; but if so he owed him a very small royalty. The merit of this poet is that he manages occasionally to lighten his darkness with flashes, to refresh his desert with flowers, of by no means mediocre poetry. We owe to him one of the oldest forms, if not the oldest form, of the beautiful saying —

Be the day weary, or be the day long,
At lenghth it drawth to evensong.

For which and other things he may be forgiven such intolerable matter as the following, which deserves its place as a general example of the worse side of fifteenth-century poetry: —

And if the matter be joyful and glad,
Like countentance outwardly they make;
But moderation in their minds is had
So that outrage may them not overtake.
I cannot write too much for their sake
Them to laud,for my time is short
And the matter long which I must report.

Pastime of Pleasure, cap. xii. last stanza.

Barclay

It is between Hawes and Skelton that we may perhaps most conveniently mention a third writer, who is even more of a mere curiosity than Hawes himself, but who is as characteristic of his time as wither.  This is Alexander Barclay (1), the Englisher of the famous Bale's time (that is to say, in the age just after his own, and partly overlapping it) there was a doubt whether Barclay was a Scot or an Englishman. The spelling of his name would incline to the former hypothesis, which also has early authority of the positive kind; but no connection of any sort is known between Barclay and Scotland, all his associations are with the South and the South-west of England, and the spelling (always a very untrustworthy guide) is after all merely the pronounced form of "Berkeley." His literary qualities are scarcely such that the two divisions of the island need fight very keenly for him. He must have been born somewhere about the beginning of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and pretty certainly had a University education.  The only allusion traced in his work is to Cambridge (2), but Scots more often went to Oxford, and Oxford had more connection with the West country. He was certainly for some time chaplain of the College of St. Mary Ottery, in Devonshire (the future birthplace of Coleridge), and seems there to have translated the Ship of Fools (3), which Pynson publishedin 1508, dedicated to Bishop Cornish of Exeter. He may have had poetical employment at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was a monk at Ely, and after the dissolution of the monasteries obtained livings in Essex and Somerset under Edward VI., as well as later, just before his death in 1552, that of Allhallows, Lombard Street.

(1) Warton has given a rather full acount of Barclay (iii. 189-203, ed. 1871), and Ritson is as usual to the point in four pages of the Bibliographia Poetica. But the long introductions to the modern editions mentioned below are the things to consult.
(2) Trumpington, also mentioned, would prove nothing, because Chaucer had made it a place of literature.
(3) Very handsomely reprinted, with the woodcuts, by T. H. Jamieson (Edinburght, 2 vols. 4to, 1874).

Barclay's work was extensive, but chiefly translated. He "did" Gringore's Castle of Labor before the Ship, and after it some more, though not wholly, original Eclogues, of which the Citizen and Uplandishman (1) is the only one easily accessible in full. Divers other works, some of them extant, are assigned to him, and he seems in one, Contra Skeltonum, to have made a formal onslaught on a poet at whom his exsiting poems contain more than one fling.

(1) Ed. Fairholt, for the Percy Society, 1847. The introduction contains very full extracts from the other four.

The Ship of Fools

Barclay seems really to deserve the place of first Eclogue-writer in English, if any one cares for this fortuitous and rather futile variety of eminence. His Eclogues, moreover, are not merely more original, but, so far as they are accessible, seem to be less jejune than the Ship. This latter owes its fame partly to its rarity before the reprint of five and twenty years ago, partly to the famous and really admirable woodcuts which it contains. The first "fole" — the possessor of unprofitable books — has a certain savour of promise which is unluckily but seldom fulfilled afterwards. Still, mainly thanks to the illustrations and to the general sympathy with Puck in seeing and saying, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" It is possible to make one's way thorugh the long catalogue which fills from two thousand to two thousand five hundred stanzas of rhyme-royal. The individual line is rather an interesting one, showing a sort of intermediate stage between the would-be rigid decasyllable of Lydgate and Occleve and the long rambling twelves or fourteeners of the mid-sixteenth century poets. Sometimes Barclay permits himself a full Alexandrine; oftener (in fact, in the majority of cases) he lengthens out his line with trisyllabic feet, so arranged as sometimes to take very little keep of the iambic basis. 

The Eclogues

This same line is found in the Eclogues, arranged mainly in couplets, but with insertions in stanza, such as the allegorical octaves describing the Tower of Virtue in the Fourth Eclogue. In the first three (paraphrased from Aeneas Silvius) the speakers are Coridon and Cornix, in the fourth Codrus and Menalcas, in the fifthe (the Citizen and Uplandishman [countryman]), Augustus and Faustus. They have for almost pervanding subject that rather monotonous grumbling at the vices, follies, and ingratitude of courts with which the natural results of the Tudor concentration of the fountains not merely of honour but of profit in the sovereign, and of which we find more than an echo in Spenser.


Skelton

No more curious instance of literary contrast could possibly be provided than that which is supplied by the writer who is always coupled with Hawes, and sometimes with Barclay, his enemy. The birthplace of John Skelton (2) is given with the very sufficient variants of Cumberland and Norfollk; his birth-year must have been somewhere about 1460, and so in a not uninteresting way he takes up in the cradle the torch which Lydgate and Occleve dropped in the tomb. He was pretty certainly a Cambridge man, and was M.A. in 1484. His earliest poem is though to be one on the death of Edward IV., which is noteworthy, like Dunbar's Lament for the Makers, for a Latin refrain, melancholy in tone. Caxton in 1490, and in the preface to his Aeneid, speaks of Skelton's scholarship with reverence, and tells us that he was Poet Laureate in the University of Oxford. This title, which Skelton also enjoyed from Louvain and Cambridge, has caused mistakes which seem even yet not to be universally cleared up. Perhaps it is too much to speak of it as a 2degree"; it was rather, in old Oxford language, a "position" in rhetoric and poetics (then practically confounded) which necessitated a verse-thesis. It had nothing to do, except accidentally, with the modern sense of "Poet Laureate" which practically comes into existence with Ben Jonson and the seventeenth century.

(2) A handy edition appeared in 1736. Chalmers included Skelton in his poets, and Dyce re-edited him in 1843.

His life

Skelton seems to have been one of the numerous literary protégés of Lady Margaret and her son Henry VII.; he took orders in 1498, when he must have been no longer a young man, and was tutor to Henry VIII. At this time Erasmus follows Caxton as his encomiast. He became rector of Diss, in his (probably) native county, Norfolk, before 1504. Up to this time, when he was far advanced in middle life, he seems to have been continously prosperous and well-reputed. He lived twenty-five years longer, during which he became a complete Ishmaelite. The beginning of his trouble seems to have been that he married. At any rate he was suspended for this offence (or perhaps not for marriage at all) at some time not clearly known, and seems to have gone to London. The King favoured his old tutor, but either from jealousy or sheer quarrelsomeness, or, as his partisans maintain, reforming zeal, he fell foul of Wolsey, whose friend he had formely been. A series of satires on the minister made it necessary for Skelton to take refuge in the sanctuary of Westminster, where he died in 1529, probably near his full term of days, and only a year before the former friend, now foe, on whom his pupil, and Wolsey's master, somewhat ungratefully revenged him.

His poems

One point which distinguishes nearly, not quite, all Skelton's verse from that of Hawes is that it is thoroughly alive. The Crown of Laurel, a stately, sterile, eminently fifteenth-century piece, mainly in rhyme-royal and aureate language, does indeed meet us in the forefront of his work and inspire doubt and dread —

Aulus Gellius, that noble historian,
Orace also with his newe poetry,
Master Terence, the famous comicar,

are lines likely to "strike a chill." But if Skelton was not equal to "new poetry" himself, he could at any rate rebel against the old; if he could not write musically, he could at any rate take refuge in the doggerel of talent and almost of genius. Even this very poem, with its addresses to various young ladies of high birth, contains, in the short staccato metres that Skelton loved — to Margaret Hussey ("Merry Margaret As Midsummer Flower"), to Isabel Pennell ("My maiden Isabel, Whose mammy and whose daddy Brought forth a goodly baby"), to Gertrude Statham ("Mistress Gertrude, With Womanhood Endued"), — very pleasant examples of better things. The Bouge of Court retains the dim and dreary personages — Dread, Suspicion, Disdain, Favell, etc. — of allegory.

The real Skelton, taking the order of his works as usually printed, emerges first in a very long, very boisterous, very rude, and in part rather childish and ignoble, but curiously spirited and fresh, ballad of triumph over the Duke of Albany, who ran away shamefully with a hundred thousand "tratland Scots and faint-hearted Frenchmen" beside the water of Tweed. Here — in almost the shortest possible lines, anapaestic in general character and for the most part of two feet only, rhymed in couplet, and with language sometimes almost inarticulate in its bubbling volubility, strongly allterated, using the repeated beginning of the line freely — Skelton crows and whoops at the defeated enemy with a heartiness that may not be chivalrous, but is certainly unfeigned. Speak Parrot, in rhyme-royal, is an odd mixture of the author's favourite half-gibberish doggerel with "aureate" language and "rhethorike" — indeed, it is impossible not to see a deliberate satire on the second in both constituents. The above-mentioned Dirge on Edward IV. is, of course, quite serious, couched in twelve-lined stanzas of decasyllables decidedly Occlevian in their character, with the refrain Quia ecce nunc in pulvere dormio. Against the Scots, a song of triumph for Flodden, is a duplication of the other crow, but rather more ignoble because the triumph and the tragedy were both greater. This is partly in "Skeltonics," partly in octosyllables. Ware the Hawke! is pure doggerel satire; and then a few serious pieces introduce us to what is perhaps Skelton's most vigorous, though certainly not his most elegant, work, the Tunning of Eleanor Rumming. This is a more than Hogarthian sketch, in language which might make Swift or Smollett squeamish, of the brewing and drinking of a certain browst of ale by a country ale-wife and her customers. This is wholly in the Skeltonian dimeter or monometer, which, it should be observed, has a tendency now and then to fall into six-syllabled iambics or seven-syllabled trochaics, for longer or shorter breaks, the centre of the verse shifting precisely in the same fashion as in the Genesis and Exodus or Christabel metre, of which, in fact, this is undoubtedly a shortened and doggerelised variant for satiric purposes. In this form it pervades Skelton's two chief political satires against Wolsey, Why come ye not to Court and the Book of Colin Clout, as well as the Book of Philip Sparrow, his most whimsical and graceful thing, a long desultory mourning for the pet bird of Mistress Joan Scrope.

In these, and in Skelton's minor poems, the chief of which are a Lament on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland and a morality called Magnificence, we see a fertile, restless, and ingenious spirit entirely unprovided with the proper means of expression, and just falling short of the intelligence and originality necessary to elaborate such means for itself. It is impossible not to recognise in the "Skeltonics" an attempt, crude and clumsy it is true, to get away from the intolerable dulness and dryness of the stanza-decasyllable, as it appears in Hawes and the earlier fifteenth-century poets. To this day it is difficult to see why this fit of stuttering should have come upon English. At the beginning and at the end of the 150 years of it (to pass over Skelton's younger contemporaries Wyat and Surrey for reasons) we find Chaucer before and Sackville afterwards making the seven or eight-lined stanza decasyllables the instrument of music, sweet or stately, merry or sorrowful, at their pleasure and with no sort of difficulty. Between them (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Swinburne of another matter) it seems almost impossible for an English poet to "clear his mouth of pebbles and his brow of fog."

Probably at not time would Skelton have been a great poet in the serious and passionate way — probably, at all, his genius would have inclined to comedy and to satire. As it is, he holds a position with Butler as the chief English verse-writer who has deliberately preferred to be burlesque to the verge, and in his case considerably over the verge, of grotesque and doggerel. In comparing the two men, whose powers, natural and acquired, do not seem to have been very different, while their tempers were also not dissimilar (Skelton inclining rather to the jovial, Butler to the saturnine), it is impossible not to remember that Butler came just after, as Skelton came just before, the enormous, the incalculable advances made by the Elizabethan period, not merely in language and metre, but in everything, small and great, that pertains to the business of poetry. And we ought to give the author of Philip Sparrow and Eleanor Rumming and Why come ye not to Court a substantial allowance for the fact.

Geoffrey Chaucer

—oOo—