confined to Phylyp Sparowe, here are his lines 'To maystres Margaret Hussey': Mirry Margaret, As mydsomer flowre, Or hawke of the towre; With solace and gladnes, Moche mirthe and no madnes, cite So maydenly, 7 8 9 incense (Lines 1-64.) 1 Babbling. 2 Foolish. 3 Branxton Moor was the name by which the English called their victory. Stubborn. 5 Quayre or quair, a book, especially of poetry. 6 A summoner-Chaucer's sompnourwas a kind of apparitor, a humble legal officer, ecclesiastical or other, who delivered summonses: James IV. is disrespectfully called Jemmy and a summoner, because of his citation or challenge to Henry VIII. 7 King Copping seems to have been a character or name in some rhyme, game, or play. 8 Hob Lobbyn was obviously also a personage in a rhyme or game; Lowdean being Lothian. ? Locrian may be Lochryan; but Skelton used what he believed to be Scotch names at random. 10 Perth was called St Johnstoun. In these lines from Colyn Cloute we have Skelton's criticism of his own verse: And if ye stande in doute All my connyng bagge, For though my ryme be ragged, If ye take well therwith, It hath in it some pyth. The Churche is put in faute; They say, and loke so hy, As though they wolde fly Above the sterry skye. blether The one (Lines 46-74.) Lastly, to show that the use of his 'ragged rhymes' for something besides railing was not So womanly Her demenyng In every thynge, There is another charming poem to a lady in Speke Parrot; and it is fair to add that in his 'Wofully arrayed' Skelton showed that he could write on one aspect of Christ's passion with the fervour and occasional music of the best of the miracle-plays. man. Barclay. Despite attempts to connect him with Devonshire, and the uncertainty of Bishop Bale as to his nationality, there can be no doubt that Alexander Barclay, the third poet of our trio, was a ScotsBut the whole of his manhood was passed in England, and though the industry of a Scottish editor has detected Scottish forms in his writing. his language is substantially the ordinary literary English of his day, and he falls therefore to be considered among English authors. Born about 1475, he was probably educated, in part at least, at Oxford, seems to have travelled in France and Italy, took holy orders, and probably about 1500 was appointed priest in the college of Ottery St Mary in Devonshire by its warden, Bishop Cornish, to whom, in 1508, he dedicated his Ship of Fools. printed by Pynson the following year. He had previously translated from the French Le Chasteau de Labour (The Castell of Laboure), a dull poem by Pierre Gringoire, and this Pynson had published without his name in 1506. An excellent prose translation, The famous cronycle of the warre which the romayns had agaynst Jugurth, usurper of the kyngdome of Numidy, from 'the renowmed romayn Salust,' was published by Pynson without date. It was made 'at comaundement of the right hye and mighty prince, Thomas Duke of Northfolke,' for whom also Barclay compiled in 1521 an Introductory to write and to pronounce French. Meanwhile Barclay had left Ottery St Mary, and had gone to Ely as a Benedictine monk. While at Ely he translated, under the title of the Myrrour of Good Manners, the De Quatuor Virtutibus of Dominic Mancini, a popular poem of the fifteenth century in Latin elegiacs, which Turberville also Englished. He also wrote, probably in different years, five Eclogues, of which the first three are imitated from the De Miseriis Curialium of Æneas Sylvius (Enea Piccolomini, Pope Pius II.), and a Life of St George, from the Latin of Baptista Mantuanus. The year 1521, the date assigned to the Introductory to write French, is the latest with which Barclay's literary activity can be connected; but he is said to have left the Benedictine Order for the Franciscan, and he was presented in 1546 to livings in Essex and Somersetshire, and in 1552 to that of All Hallows, Lombard Street. In this last year he died at Croydon, and was buried in Croydon Church on 10th June. Barclay's Myrrour of Good Manners and his other minor works are of small importance, but his Ship of Fools and his Eclogues take a high rank in the literature of his day. A note to Pynson's edition of the former work informs us that 'this present Boke named the Shyp of Folys of the worlde was translated in the College of Saynt Mary Otery in the counte of Devonshyre out of Laten, Frenche, and Doche [i.e. German] into Englysshe tonge by Alexander Barclay, Preste;' and the mention of the three different languages throws some light on Barclay's methods. The famous Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brant, in which folly of every kind was satirised, was printed at Basel in 1494, translated into Latin verse three years later by Jakob Locher, and speedily retranslated from Latin into French by Pierre Rivière of Poitiers. If Barclay had been translating Brant as he translated Sallust, one version would have sufficed him; but a glance at the Latin text which he prints in his own edition suffices to show that his work is not a translation, hardly even a paraphrase, but a poem of very considerable claim to originality, in which the successive points of the original are taken up and worked out in Barclay's own way. Here, for example (we quote from Pynson's edition of 1509), is the description of the first fool of all, the Book-Fool, who acts as steersman to the ship: I am the firste fole of all the hole navy, That in this shyp the chefe place I governe But yet I have them in great reverence follow The parsons of Honiton and Clyst have nothing to do with Brant. They were neighbours of Barclay's in Devonshire, and his introduction of them into his Ship shows the free spirit in which he handled his original. So again, if we take the stanzas 'Of newe fasshions and disgised garmentes,' we shall find that some of them have a very English turn: Drawe nere ye courters and galantz disgised, As God hath you made: his warke is despysed, Ye thynke you more crafty than God omnipotent. Unstable is your mynde, that shewes by your garment; A fole is knowen by his toyes and his cote, But by theyr clothinge nowe may we many note. Fewe kepeth mesure, but excesse and great outrage A fox furred jentelman of the fyrst yere or hede, Yet fynde I another sort almoste as bad as thay, bauble eyes own, of which the character may be guessed from two stanzas on the subject of fine clothes : precise But ye proude galaundes that thus your selfe disgise, Away with this pryde, this statelynes let be, Of John the Prophete-theyr clothynge was obscure, an In excerpts the Ship of Fools, with its side-lights on contemporary manners, is by no means unattractive book, but it suffers from its length and its unrelieved didacticism. Barclay himself must have perceived this, for he ends his poem, not without bitterness : Holde me excusyd, for-why my wyll is gode because I wryte no jest ne tale of Robyn Hode, SOW To his credit, Skelton took this gibe goodhumouredly; and he could afford to do so, for his Phylyp Sparowe has much the more real life in it. Nevertheless the Ship of Fools is a notable book, and deserved the reputation which it enjoyed, and of which the shadow has lasted to our own day. To have introduced, in his Eclogues, the pastoral into English poetry is also a notable point to Barclay's credit. Pastoral poetry was subsequently worked to death, and is now held in but low esteem. Nevertheless the 'Prologe' to Barclay's 'fyfte Eglog' Of the Cytezen and Uplondyshman-here quoted from the Percy Society's reprint (1847) of an undated edition by Wynkyn de Worde-will show the novelty of the note which it brought into the English poetry of his day: 1 In colde January, whan fyre is comfortable, 2 3 hair Nor of his clothynge one wryncle stode a-wrye; 5 7 They 1 Shepherds. 2 Was called. 3 Husbandman. Displayed himself. 5 Seller of fancy biscuits. 6 Dainty girl. 7 In the country. 8 Argument. This is but poor work compared with the best verse in the same vein of Barclay's fellow-countrymen, but it added a fresh element to English poetry, and for this Barclay deserves his share of honour. Of the three poets whose work we have been reviewing, Stephen Hawes attained only a meagre popularity in his own century; the poems of Skelton and Barclay, on the other hand, were frequently reprinted. With the exception of Skelton's shortline poems, the Skeltonical verse to which he has given his name, the works of all three are now read only by literary antiquaries; and several of those of Hawes and Barclay, for lack of a modern editor, are not accessible even to these. Despite snatches of music in Skelton, which invite a kinder verdict, the importance of all three poets is indeed mainly historical. But although their own works can hardly be said to live, they brought fresh life into English poetry, introducing new subjects and new ideas, and, in the case of Skelton, some metrical enrichment. Moreover, they made an experiment, which had to be made, though it was foredocmed to failure. Partly from the practice of translation, partly from the increased reading of foreign languages, especially classical Latin, new words were pouring into the English language, and the poetical value of these 'inkhorn terms' had to be tested by use. If we look down a page of the stanzas of any of these poets, the eye is struck at once with the length of the words with which the lines end. If a reckoning were made, it would probably be found that of the rhyme-words in these stanzas quite fifty per cent. are of Latin origin. I am but a yong mayd,' Miss Scrope is made to remark in Phylyp Sparowe: But it was precisely this 'ennewing' by means of 'wordis elect' and 'pullysshed termes' that Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay aimed at in their serious poetry. Chaucer, that famous clerke, sang Skelton; but he goes on to explain that Lydgate wrote 'after an hyer rate'-that is, he used Latinisms instead of homely English or words which, if they had come from the French, had yet been made pliable by use in ordinary talk. Words like these, it was thought, were good enough for humorous poetry, but elegance was only to be attained by the use of a much more learned and 'curious' vocabulary. The court poets, the writers of interludes, the poetical preface-writers like Robert Copland, all aimed at this high-sounding phraseology, and in proportion to the amount of it which they introduced succeeded in making their works unreadable. It was fortunate that the experiment was not made at a time when there was finer poetic material to be spoilt. ALFRED W. POLLARD. Renaissance and Reformation. When Chaucer was drawing from the new wells of Italian literature, the great movement was in progress which was ere long to transform not merely literatures but social and religious ideals throughout Europe. The Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was rather a revolt than a rebirth-a revolt against medieval dogma, against ecclesiastical tradition, against all that fettered the free-play of intellectual interests and impulses; against prejudice, routine, and stupidity, as well as against some better things. Passionate determination to know and enjoy to the full all the treasures of the classical tongues was accompanied by an outburst of new literary effort, so that pedantry was overborne by originality. As reverence for the Holy Roman Empire and its rival the Papacy declined, as feudalism yielded to the demand for liberty, the spirit of nationality developed, the national languages were cherished and cultivated. If in the East the Turk increased his power at the expense of Christendom, yet the fall of Constantinople stocked Italian towns with accomplished Greek scholars and invaluable Greek manuscripts; and in the West the Saracens were driven out of Spain. The Cape was rounded, America discovered; Copernicus prepared the way for Galileo; books were printed; and philosophy, science, and art were vivified. The Middle Ages were past, and the old world had become new. The Humanism of France was not as that of Italy, and in Germany, in the Low Countries, and in England the Revival of Letters ran a different course. In Italy the Renaissance paganised religion, dulled moral insight, and tolerated if it did not create a new type of princely and oligarchic tyranny. In France the religious outcome was checked by reaction and systematic repression. In Germany, the Low Countries, and England the love of learning was closely associated with religious earnestness and an eager desire for reforms in Church and State, in education, national economy, and human life. Biblical studies were fostered; and the outcome was the New Learning and the Reformation—though in all countries there were earnest reformers who held with Erasmus and More rather than with Luther or Calvin, and in the Reformation saw the triumph of narrower over more truly liberal ideals. England was later than the great Continental countries to be drawn fully into the current of the Renaissance, and the forces which made for secular culture were swiftly followed by those which heralded the religious revolt. It is difficult to say how far Lollardy remained a living power; some of the roots of the new movement were certainly of native growth. William Grocyn (c. 1446-1519) and Thomas Linacre (1460–1524) brought literary humanism back with them from Italy, and by the end of the fifteenth century had established the study of Greek at Oxford. Cambridge followed a little later, and Erasmus, the friend of More and Colet, lectured there for a short time. William Lilly (c. 1468–1522) taught Greek in London early in the sixteenth century as he had learnt it in Italy from Constantinopolitan refugees. But John Colet (1467-1519), who also went to meet the new light in Italy, was more drawn to Savonarola than to Pico and Ficino, to the Bible more than even to Plato and the Pseudo-Dionysius; and on his return gave at Oxford the famous lectures on St Paul and his Epistles which departed utterly from the traditional verbal and allegorical exegesis. At London as Dean of St Paul's he continued to preach, in English as well as in Latin, on the Gospel story, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer. Though doubts of his orthodoxy were raised, and though he demanded many and sweeping reforms, he, like his friend More, was in no wise disposed to break with the historical Church, and he died before the crisis came. Sir Thomas More was the most conspicuous representative of the movement founded by Linacre and directed by Colet. Ascham, though he cautiously took sides with the governing powers, had more in common with Erasmus than either with Colet or with Luther. From 1517 the eyes of all Europe were fixed on the great world-drama being enacted in Germany, where the audacity of the Augustinian monk Luther had renewed in another shape the old-established hostility between Pope anc Emperor, between Church officialism and national and personal independence, between Latin and Teutonic Europe. As the opposition became more direct and the breach widened, Wittenber; became for a time the centre of European interests. English and Scottish students pilgrimaged tither; and Lutheran books, in Latin, French, German, and English, were imported into Britan. The bishops impounded these heretical works, printed or written, and More supported Wošey in trying to keep them out, Tyndale's Testament amongst the rest; Cambridge first and ther Oxford were infected by Lutheranism; the kin, the Lord Chancellor, and Bishop Fisher wrote against Luther and his sect in vain; and heresy isserted itself more and more. What the course of theReformation in England might have been but for ae masterful and erratic personality of Henry VII. and the political currents and accidents of te time it is idle to conjecture; nor can its hisory be traced here. By 1532 the breach with Rone was complete, and the best English energies wee largely absorbed in the religious and political cntroversies and struggles of the time. The culmation of the Renaissance |