ends happily. It has great charm, and is one of the prettiest things in our old poetry. Otterburn and Chevy Chase tell of fights and brave deeds in most spirited fashion. The Robin Hood ballads were printed in 1489, but no collection of such poems was made until the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet men must have delighted in them all through the years. Sir Philip Sidney's heart was moved by those old songs more than with a trumpet"; Shakespeare must have been intimately acquainted with a large number of them, for he is constantly quoting snatches of them in his plays; Ben Jonson said that he would rather have been the author of Chevy Chase than of all his plays, but too much attention should not perhaps be paid to such utterances; Dryden took pleasure in reading the old ballads, and Addison devoted several papers in the Spectator to their criticism. It will be best to deal here with three poets who in point of actual date belong to the early years of the sixteenth century, but in the style and subject-matter of their poems belong to the fifteenth. Stephen Hawes and The chief poem of Stephen Hawes, the Pastime of Pleasure or the history of Grand Amour and La Belle Pucelle, was written about 1506. It is an the "Pastime allegory in the Chaucerian manner, showing of Pleasure". evidence of a close aquaintance with French poetry. It probably influenced both Sackville and Spenser. Hawes took Lydgate, The monk of Bury, flower of eloquence, for his master, and at the end of his poem praises him and Gower and Chaucer. As the following stanza shows, Grand Amour's courtship of his lady is sweet and simple and tender: O sweet lady, the true and perfect star Of my true heart! O, take ye now pity! Hawes possessed the poetical faculty, and occasionally has passages that are sweet and tender in thought and musical in sound. He has given one couplet to English poetry that we would not willingly be without: O mortal folk, you may behold and see Is death at last thorough his course and might. At last the bell ringeth to evensong. Hallam, the great nineteenth-century critic, compares Hawes, as a writer of allegory, with Bunyan. He finds that with both of them, "their characters, though abstract in name, have a personal truth about them they render the general allegory subservient to inculcating a system, the one of philosophy, the other of religion". But Hallam is careful to state that he does not consider the Pastime of Pleasure equal in merit to the Pilgrim's Progress. Alexander Barklay, who was born about 1475 and died in 1552, wrote several translations. The best known of them is the Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff), Barklay. a poem written by Sebastian Brandt in a German dialect. It was soon translated into Latin and French, and Barklay seems to have made use of the three versions. The poem describes the folly of the world and the great company of fools who inhabit it. There is the Fool of Books, who collects them, values them as curiosities, and takes no wisdom by them: "all is in them and nothing in my mind"; and countless other fools who abound all the world over. Barklay does not scruple to add to Brandt's gallery of fools entirely English types, and to adapt his pictures of folly to suit English life; thus he gives us some idea of the sorts of fools specially to be met with in the England of that time. But Barklay's chief interest for us lies in the fact that Pastoral poetry. he introduced into English literature a new form of composition, the eclogue1, or pastoral poem. The pastoral had its origin in Greek literature, and the finest examples of it were written by Theocritus (fl. B.C. 282). Virgil (70 B.C.-19 B.C.), the Roman poet, took up the eclogue, and put into it things that had little or nothing to do with simple shepherd life. Petrarch and the Italian poets of the Renaissance imitated him. Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516) wrote Latin eclogues,2 which Barclay imitated in English. In this class of poems the characters introduced are always shepherds and shepherdesses, living in the open air amid downs, fields, and valleys, and the poems consist of reports of conversations held while the sheep are safely pasturing near at hand. The topics discussed in such poems include anything and everything, and are often of a kind that could not possibly have the least interest for real shepherds. 3 Barklay's book appeared about 1514, and is the first example of pastoral poetry by an English poet. In 1563 Barnaby Googe published his Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, but before Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar (1579) no pastoral poem of any great importance in English literature had been written. Last of the group, and by far the greatest, comes John Skelton, whom Erasmus called "a light and ornament of English letters". Born about Skelton. 1460, educated probably at both Oxford and Cambridge, he took holy orders and was for a while tutor to Prince Henry, afterwards Henry VIII. At one time he seems to have been a friend of Wolsey, but for some cause unknown turned against him and wrote scathing satires on Wolsey and the court, full of vigour and vivacity. 1 Eclogue (Gk. ekloge, selection, a short poem) is a name given to a pastoral poem. 2 His work was a favourite school-book of the age. Shakespeare, in Love's Labour's Lost (iv. 2.), makes the schoolmaster, Holofernes, speak of the " Good old Mantuan", and declare that he "who understandeth thee not loves thee not ". Robin and Makyn, an excellent pastoral by the Scottish poet Henryson, had however been written earlier. Cf. p. 82. On his death-bed, 21st June, 1529, in the Sanctuary of Westminster, where he had taken refuge from the cardinal's vengeance, he is said to have prophesied Wolsey's fall. He was buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster. Skelton's poem The Book of Colin Clout is a powerful satire on the church, and gives incidentally a vivid picture of England at the time. The name of Colin Clout passed into English poetry as the appellation of a poor man, generally a rustic. Curiously enough it is the name by which Spenser in his poems frequently designates himself. He may have taken it from Skelton's work, because in his first poems Spenser, though with far more gentleness, advocates the same kinds of reforms as Skelton desired to bring about. More probably, however, Spenser derived the name from Marot, the French poet, whom we know he imitated, and who uses 'Colin' to designate himself or his hero.1 Skelton's finest work is to be sought in his satires. Those directed more particularly against Wolsey, Why come ye not to court and Speak Parrot, point out in the bluntest and most outspoken fashion the evil qualities of the great churchman and statesman, and declaim against the growing worldliness and self-seeking "Of the Clergy all Both great and small". He employs here, as in most of his poems, a jingling metre of short riming lines of his own invention, and sometimes intermixes Latin words. The Book of Philip Sparrow, though written in the same form, is a poem of a very different character. It is the lament of a young girl, Jane Scroop, a pupil of the nuns at Carow near Norwich, for the death of her pet sparrow whom the cat had killed. Fanciful and 1 Some take Colin to be derived from the Latin colonus, a tiller of the ground, and Clout to be the common name of a mechanic or artisan. Hence the same word comprises both country peasants and town work men. sportive, it abounds in charming passages. calls it "an exquisite and original poem ”. Coleridge Other poems by Skelton are the Bowge1 of Court, an allegorical poem with finely drawn characters; the Garland of Laurel, which offers an example of a poet writing a thousand lines in praise of himself; and the Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng, a burlesque account of an alewife and of the friends who buy beer of her. The last was extremely popular, and is animated and humorous, but often very coarse.2 Skelton also wrote a drama entitled Magnificence. It is in the manner of the moralities, with vices and virtues for characters. The excel II. The Scottish Poets. While poetry was at a low ebb in England, in Scotland we have to record a number of poets of a high order. In variety of metre, in love of nature, in simplicity, force, and directness of expression their work in some ways presents elements of the Elizabethan poetry that was to follow them, while at the same time it often rests for form and matter on Chaucer and his contemporaries. lence of the Scottish poets. Andrew of Wyntoun finished his riming Chronicle of Scotland about 1420. He wrote it at the priory of St. Andrew of Serf's Inch, an island in Loch Leven. It Wyntoun. gives in eight-syllable riming lines, more or less regular, a history of Scotland, beginning with Adam and Eve and ending with the death of Robert III. in 1406. His object was to spread a knowledge of Scottish history among the people. In the sixth book he tells with some spirit the story of Macbeth, afterwards employed by Shakespeare as the material for one of his finest tragedies. 1 Fr. bouche, mouth. It was the usual term for a courtier's right of eating at the king's expense. 2 At Leatherhead, in Surrey, a tavern still exists with the sign Elynour Rummyng, and it is known that Henry VIII. sometimes frequented that neighbourhood for the sake of the fishing in the river Mole. |