Cheke held his settled it for his subjects in all other matters. own, and replied with a treatise, De Pronuntiatione Linguæ Græca, which was published afterwards in 1555. Smith wrote also a sensible letter on the subject, and the Chancellor's decrees were not obeyed. At the age of two-and-twenty, Cheke had published an English tract, called "A Remedy for Sedition, wherein are contained many things concerning the true and loyal obeisance that Commons owe unto their Prince and Sovereign Lord the King." In later days his loyalty and his fame as a scholar caused him to be appointed tutor to Prince Edward. 52. Sir David Lindsay, of the Mount, after the death of James V., went officially to deliver back to Charles V., in the Netherlands, the late king's badge of the order of the Golden Fleece. In 1544-6 he sat in three Parliaments as member for Cupar. Luther died on the 18th of February, 1546. On the 28th of May, in the same year, occurred the event moralised by Lindsay in his poem called "The Tragedie of the vmquhylle" (whilom) "maist reverend father, David, be the mercy of God, Cardinal and Archibyschope of Sanct Androvs," &c. Here Lindsay told in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza how, when he was sitting in his oratory, reading Boccaccio on the "Falls of Illustrious Men" (ch. v. § 13), there appeared to him "Ane woundit man, aboundantlie bledyng, "With feeble voice, as man opprest with pain," he declared himself to be the late Cardinal Beaton, and told the story of his life, and of his fall from the height of power. He was slain, and his body, salted and closed in a box, lay for seven months in a dunghill without Christian burial. Let all my brother prelates, said the ghost, amend their lives, remembering that they will be called to account for everything belonging to their cures : "Ye prelat, quhilk hes thousandis for to spende, Ye send ane sempyll freir for you to preche: Your selfis in your templis for to teche." The death of Beaton brought together Knox and Lindsay, for Lindsay was then among those who persuaded Knox to his first preaching. TO A.D. 1546.] JOHN KNOX. 303 53. John Knox was born in 1505, at Gifford, in East Lothian. He was educated in the Grammar School at Haddington, and in 1522 matriculated in St. Andrew's University, which then had John Mair (§ 33) for its provost. He took priests' orders, but was drawn to the side of the Reformers; and became the friend and follower of George Wishart, a Scottish schoolmaster, who, about 1536, began to preach as a Reformer. Wishart went to England and recanted, but, recovering more than his old boldness, came back to Scotland in 1543, and, though of gentle character, preached with intense enthusiasm. Thus he stirred among the people violent antagonism to the practices that he denounced, so that they wept over them in themselves, and raged at them in others. John Knox, to protect his beloved preacher, whose assassination had been once attempted, waited upon him bearing a two-handed sword. Flesh and blood went for little in the growing heat of spiritual conflict. On the 20th of November, 1541, at Geneva, Calvin's ecclesiastical and moral code was established. Under this code it was forbidden to read "Amadis of Gaul," or any romances. Three children were solemnly punished for stopping outside to eat apples after service had begun. In 1568 a child was beheaded for having struck her parents. A lad of sixteen was sentenced to death for only threatening to strike his mother. And this was called the "Yoke of Christ." Knox was tutor to the sons of the lairds of Niddrie and Ormiston. When Wishart was seized as a heretic, Knox desired to share his fate; "Nay," said Wishart," return to your bairns" (his pupils), "and God bless you. One is enough for a sacrifice." Wishart's martyrdom, in March, 1545, witnessed by Beaton from his velvet 'cushions at a window of the castle of St. Andrew's, was followed in May, 1546, by the murder of Beaton. This had been for two years the subject of a conspiracy, of which both Wishart and King Henry VIII. had an assenting knowledge. To Wishart and others plot of such a murder was honest question of hewing Agag in pieces. Beaton's deathblow was prefaced by the man who dealt it with a deliberate speech, declaring it to be about to fall "only because thou hast been, and remainest, an obstinate enemy against Christ Jesus and His Gospel." The sixteen men who had surprised Beaton in his castle held it, and welcomed into it all men whose zeal for Reformed opinions brought them within the danger of the Scottish hierarchy. The chief murderers of Beaton, Henry's most vigorous political antagonist in Scotland, received pensions from the King of England; and the garrison-Castilians as they were called—in the strong castle by the sea, received also supplies of money and victuals from Henry VIII. In April, 1547, Knox joined the Castilians. Sir David Lindsay also went among them. Their chaplain had been worsted in argument by an orthodox dean. Knox came to the rescue with his pen. Then many of them urged Knox to preach. He had renounced his priests' orders, and said he had no vocation; but it was urged on him that every congregation has an inherent right to call any qualified person to be its teacher. So Knox began his preaching. In August of the same year a French squadron obliged the garrison to capitulate, and Knox became for two years a prisoner in the French galleys. When on one occasion an image of the Virgin was brought round for the prisoners to kiss, Knox said, "Trouble me not. Such an idol is accursed, therefore I will not touch it." When it was forced on him, he threw it into the river, saying, "Let Our Lady now save herself. She is light enough; let her swim." "A 54. The Scottish Reformers of those days completed Compendious Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs, collected out of sundrie parts of Scripture, with sundrie of other ballates changed out of prophaine sangis," and set the best of the gay tunes to new words, breathing love of God or defiance of the pope, in this fashion: "The paip, that pagane full of pryd, Hee hes us blinded lang; For where the blind the blind doe gyde, No wonder both goe wrang. Of all iniquitie, Like prince and king, hee led the ring. Hay trix, trim goe trix, under the greenwode tree." On New Year's-day, 1540, when Francis I. and Charles V. rode into Paris together, and Sir Thomas Wyatt (§ 43), Ambassador Extraordinary from England, was commissioned to search quietly into the minds of those two princes, Clement Marot presented to King Francis his translation of thirty of the Psalms of David set to light song tunes or airs from the vaudevilles. Marot translated twenty more; they became even fashionable substitutes for songs on idler themes. Calvin adopted them— when set to graver strains, written specially for them by Guillaume Franc-for use in the churches of Geneva, and published them with a preface of his own, in which he com TO A.D. 1545.] ROGER ASCHAM. 305 mended the fit use of Church music. In England Thomas Sternhold felt the new impulse, and translated during Henry VIII.'s reign some of the Psalms into English. Sternhold was born in Hampshire, and after education at Oxford, became groom of the robes to Henry VIII., who liked him well enough to bequeath him a hundred marks. He desired to do with his psalms in England what had been done in France by Marot, "thinking thereby that the courtiers would sing them instead of their sonnets, but did not, only some few excepted," whose religion we respect more than their taste. 55. We now pass out of the reign of Henry VIII. with Roger Ascham, who was born, about the year 1515, at Kirkby Wiske, near Northallerton, in Yorkshire. His father, house steward in the family of Lord Scrope, had two daughters and three sons. Young Roger Ascham was educated by Sir Humphrey Wingfield, of whom he said afterwards, "This worshipful man hath ever loved, and used to have many children brought up in learning in his house, amonges whom I myself was one, for whom at term times he would bring down from London both bow and shafts. And when they should play he would go with them himself into the field, see them shoot, and he that shot fairest should have the best bow and shafts, and he that shot ill-favouredly should be mocked of his fellows till he shot better. Would to God all England had used or would use to lay the foundation of youth after the example of this worshipful man in bringing up children in the Book and the Bow; by which two things the whole commonwealth, both in peace and war, is chiefly valid and defended withal." Sir Humphrey was enforcing the spirit of the law that required all boys between seven and seventeen to be provided with a long-bow and two arrows; every Englishman older than seventeen to provide himself with a bow and four arrows; and every bowyer to make at least two cheap bows for every dear one. At fifteen Roger Ascham became a student at St. John's College, Cambridge. He took his B.A. in 1534; obtained a fellowship in his college; and in 1537 became a college lecturer on Greek. He was at home for a couple of years after 1540, during which time he obtained a pension of forty shillings from the Archbishop of York. It ceased at the archbishop's death, in 1544. In that year, 1544, Ascham wrote Toxophilus, and lost his parents, who both died on the same day. In 1545, being then twenty-nine years old, he presented "Toxophilus" to the king, at Greenwich, and was rewarded with a pension of ten pounds. "Toxophilus" was a scholar's book, designed to encourage among all gentlemen and yeomen of England the practice of archery for defence of the realm. The treatise was divided into two books of dialogue between Philologus and Toxophilus ; the first book containing general argument to commend shooting, the second a particular description of the art of shooting with the long-bow. Ascham argued for it as a worthy recreationone very fit for scholars-that in peace excludes ignoble pastimes, and in war gives to a nation strength. Men should seek, he said, to excel in it, and make it a study. Then he proceeded in the second part of his work to treat it as a study. The book was published in 1545, with a dedication to Henry VIII., and a preface, in which Ascham justified his use of English. To have written in another tongue would, he said, have better advanced his studies and his credit; but he wished to be read by the gentlemen and yeomen of England. He could not surpass what others had done in Greek and Latin; while English had usually been written by ignorant men so meanly, both for the matter and handling, that no man could do worse. Ascham was, in his preface to "Toxophilus," the first to suggest that English prose might be written with the same scholarly care that would be required for choice and ordering of words if one wrote Latin. "He that will write well in any tongue," said Ascham, "must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgment of wise men allow him. Many English writers have not done so, but using strange words as Latin, French and Italian, do make all things dark and hard. Once I communed with a man which reasoned the English tongue to be enriched and increased thereby, saying, 'Who will not praise that feast where a man shall drink at a dinner both wine, ale, and beer?' 'Truly,' quod I, 'they be all good, every one taken by himself alone, but if you put malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, and all in one pot, you shall make a drink neither easy to be known, nor yet wholesome for the body.”” The manly simplicity of Ascham's own English is in good accord with his right doctrine. His Latin was so well esteemed that in the year after the appearance of "Toxophilus" he succeeded Cheke as Public Orator, and wrote the official letters of the University. |