ciple to anything that had at that time appeared in England or elsewhere, relative to a subject of the highest importance; and the writings of SIR JOHN CHEKE (1514-1557) not only rendered an inestimable service to philology by laying the foundation of Greek studies in the University of Cambridge, where he was professor, but tended powerfully to regulate and improve the tone of English prose. The excellent precepts given by Wilson and Cheke concerning the avoidance of pedantic and affected expressions in prose, and in particular their ridicule of the then prevailing vice of alliteration and exaggerated subtlety of antithesis, were exemplified by the grave and simple propriety of their own writings. To the same category as the preceding writers mentioned will belong ROGER ASCHAM (1515-1568), the learned and affectionate preceptor of Elizabeth and the unfortunate Jane Grey. His treatise entitled the Schoolmaster, and the book called Toxophilus, devoted to the encouragement of the national use of the bow, are works remarkable for the good sense and reasonableness of the ideas, which are expressed in a plain and vigorous dignity of style that would do honor to any epoch of literature. The plans of teaching laid down in Ascham's Schoolmaster have been revived in our own day as an antidote to shallow novelties, and his advocacy of the bow has been more than carried out by the modern rifle. § 7. But though the popular literature of England in the reign of Henry VIII. naturally took, from the force of contemporary circumstances, a polemical, controversial, or philosophical tone, and writers busied themselves chiefly about those great religious questions which were then exciting universal interest, there were poets who cannot be passed over by one desirous of forming an idea of the intellectual character of that momentous period of transformation. JOHN SKELTON, the date of whose birth is unknown, but who died in 1529, was undoubtedly a man of considerable classical learning. He is spoken of by Erasmus, who passed some time in England, where he was received with warm hospitality by More, and even read lectures before the University of Cambridge, as "litterarum Anglicarum decus et lumen." He belonged to the ecclesiastical profession, was rector of Diss in Norfolk, and incessantly alludes in his writings to the honor of the laurel which he had received from Oxford; but whether this indicates a specific personal distinction, conferred upon him alone, or merely an academical degree, is not quite clearly established. He appears also to have enjoyed the privilege of wearing the king's colors or livery, and to have been to a certain degree the object of court favor: but there is reason to believe that he was not remarkable for prudence or regularity of conduct. His poetical productions, which are tolerably voluminous, may be divided into two very marked and distinct categories, his serious and comic or satiric writings. The former, which are either eulogistic poems addressed to patrons or allegorical disquisitions in a grave, lofty, and pretentious strain of moral declamation, will be found by the modern reader, who may be bold enough to examine them, insupportably stiff, tiresome, and pedantic, exhibiting, it is true, considerable learning, an elevated tone of ethical disquisition, and a pure and sometimes vigorous English style, when the poet can free himself from the trammels of Latinizing pedantry: but they are destitute of invention and grace. These poems, however, were in all probability much admired at a time when, English literature being as yet in its infancy, readers as well as writers thought more of borrowed than original conceptions, and placed learning—which was of course admired in proportion to its rarity— higher than invention. But it is in his comic and satirical writings that Skelton is truly original; he struck out a path in literature, not very high it is true, but one in which he had no predecessors and has found no equals. He engaged, with an audacity and an apparent impunity which now appear equally inexplicable, in a series of the most furious attacks upon the then all-powerful favorite and minister Wolsey: and in the whole literature of libels and pasquinades there is nothing bolder and more sweeping than these invectives. They are written in a peculiar short doggerel measure, the rhymes of which, recurring incessantly, and sometimes repeated with a rapidity that almost takes away the reader's breath, form an admirable vehicle for violent abuse, invariably couched in the most familiar language of the people. He has at once perfectly described and exemplified the character of his "breathlesse rhymes" in the following passage: "For though my rime be ragged, Tattered and jagged, All that is coarse, quaint, odd, familiar, in the speech of the commonest of the people, combined with a command of learned and pedantic imagery almost equal to the exhaustless vocabulary of Rabelais, is to be found in Skelton; and his writings deserve to be studied, were it only as an abundant source of popular English. In one strange extravaganza, entitled "The Tunning of Elinour Rummyng," he has described the attractions of the browst of a certain alewife, and the furious eagerness of the women of the neighborhood to taste the barley-bree of Dame Rummyng, who is said to have been a real person and to have kept an alehouse at Leatherhead, in Surrey. Elinour and her establishment, and her thirsty customers, are painted with extraordinary humor and with a vast fecundity of images, some of which are so coarse as to exceed all bounds of moderation and even of decency. Of the humor, knowledge of low life, and force of imagination displayed, there can be but one opinion. Another very strange pleasantry of this humorist is the Boke of the Sparrow, a sort of dirge or lamentation on the death of a tame sparrow, the favorite of a young lady who belonged to a Convent. The bird was unfortunately killed by a cat, and after devoting this cat in particular and the whole race of cats in general to eternal punishment in a sort of humorous excommunication, the poet proceeds to describe a funeral service performed, for the repose of Philip Sparrow's soul, by all the birds; in which we have a parody of the various parts of the Catholic funeral ritual. In this work, as well as in most of Skelton's writings, we find Latin and French freely intermingled with his nervous and popular English; and this singularly heightens the comic effect. Skelton's purely satiric productions are principally directed against Wolsey, and against the Scottish king and nation, over whose fatal defeat at Flodden the railing satirist exults in a manner unworthy of a generous spirit. His principal attacks upon Wolsey are to be found in the poems entitled the Booke of Colin Clout, Why Come Ye not to Court, and the Bouge of Court. Two poets, who flourished nearly at the same time, Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barklay, deserve mention for the influence they exerted on the intellectual character of their age, though their writings have fallen into neglect. STEPHEN HAWES (fl. 1509), the elder of the two, whom Warton describes as the “only writer deserving the name of a poet in the reign of Henry VII.," was a favorite of that monarch, and the author of the Pastime of Pleasure, a long and in many passages a striking allegorical poem in the versification of old Lydgate. ALEXANDER BARKLAY, who lived a little later under Henry VIII. and died at an advanced age, at Croydon, in Surrey, in 1552, translated into English verse Sebastian Brandt's once-celebrated satire of the Ship of Fools, an epitome of the various forms of pedantry and affectation.* In the writings of both we see the rapid development of flexibility and harmony of English versification, the approach to that consummate perfection which was at no long period to be attained by Spenser and Shakspeare, under the influence, particularly in the former case, of the enlightened imitation of Italian metrical melody. How rapid this progress in taste and refinement really was, may be deduced from an examination of the poems of Sir THOMAS WYATT (the elder) and the EARL OF SURREY, who were nearly contemporaries in their lives and early deaths. The former was born in 1503, and died in 1541; the second, one of the most illustrious members of the splendid house of Howard, was born in 1517, and beheaded, under a false and absurd charge of high treason, by Henry VIII., in 1547. Both these nobles were men of rare virtues and accomplishments, Wyatt the type of the wit and statesman, and Surrey of the gallant cavalier; and both enjoyed a high popularity as poets. In their works we plainly trace the Italian spirit, and the style of their poems, though not free from that amorous and metaphysical casuistry which the example of Petrarch long rendered so universal throughout Europe, is singularly free from harshness of expression and that uncouthness of form which is perceptible in the earlier attempts of English poetry. Surrey may justly be regarded as the first English classical poet. He was the first who introduced blank verse into our English poetry, which he employed in translating the second and fourth books of Virgil's Æneid. Surrey," says Mr. Hallam, "did much for his own country * Brandt was a learned civilian of Basel, and published in 1494 a satire in German with the above title. 66 and his native language. His versification differs very considerably from that of his predecessors. He introduced a sort of involution into his style, which gives an air of dignity and remoteness from common life. It was, in fact, borrowed from the license of Italian poetry, which our own idiom has rejected. He avoids pedantic words, forcibly obtruded from the Latin, of which our earlier poets, both English and Scots, had been ridiculously fond. The absurd epithets of Hoccleve, Lydgate, Dunbar, and Douglas are applied equally to the most different things, so as to show that they annexed no meaning to them. Surrey rarely lays an unnatural stress on final syllables, merely as such, which they would not receive in ordinary pronunciation — another usual trick of the school of Chaucer. His words are well chosen and well arranged." Wyatt is inferior to Surrey in harmony of numbers and elegance of sentiment. Their "Songs and Sonnettes" were first collected and printed at London by Tottel, in 1557, in his Miscellany, which was the first printed poetical miscellany in the English language. § 8. I cannot better conclude this transitional or intercalary chapter than by making a few remarks on a peculiar class of compositions in which England is unusually rich, which are marked with an intense impress of nationality, and which have exerted, on modern literature in particular, an influence whose extent it is impossible to overrate. These are our national Ballads, produced, it is probable, in great abundance during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in many instances traceable to the "North Countrée," or the Border region between England and Scotland. This country, as the scene of incessant forays from both sides of the frontier during the uninterrupted warfare between the two countries, was naturally the theatre of a multitude of wild and romantic episodes, consigned to memory in the rude strains of indigenous minstrels. No country indeed (excepting Spain, in the admirable romances which commemorate the long struggle between the Christians and the Moors, and the collection containing the cycle of the Cid) possesses anything similar in kind or comparable in merit to the old ballads of England. They bear the marks of having been composed, somewhat like the Rhapsodies of the old Ionian bards from which the mysterious personality whom we call Homer derived at once his materials and his inspiration, by rude wandering minstrels. Such men - probably often blind or otherwise incapacitated from taking part in active life-gained their bread by singing or repeating them. These poets and narrators were a very different class from the wandering troubadours or jongleurs of Southern Europe and of France; and living in a country much ruder and less chivalric, though certainly not less warlike than Languedoc or Provence, their compositions are inimitable for simple pathos, fiery intensity of feeling, and picturesqueness of description. In every country there must exist some typical or national form of versification, adapted to the genius of the language and to the mode of declamation or musical accompaniment generally employed for assisting the effect. Thus the legendary poetry of the Greeks naturally took the form of the Homeric hexam eter, and that of the Spaniards the loose asonante versification, as in the ballads of the Cid, so well adapted to the accompaniment of the guitar. The English ballads, almost without exception, affect the iambic measure of twelve or fourteen syllables, rhyming in couplets, which, however, naturally divide themselves, by means of the cæsura or pause, into stanzas of four lines, the rhymes generally occurring at the end of the second and fourth verses. This form of metre is found predominating throughout all these interesting relics; and was itself, in all probability, a relic of the old long unrhymed alliterative measure, examples of which may be seen in the Lay of Gamelyn, or in the more recent Vision of Piers Plowman. The breaking up of the long lines into short hemistichs, to which I have just alluded, may have been originally nothing but a means for facilitating the copying of the lines into a page too narrow to admit them at full length: and the readiness with which these lines divide themselves into such hemistichs may be observed by a comparison with the long metre of the old German Nibelungen Lied, each two lines of which can be easily broken up into a stanza of four, the rhymes being then confined, as in the English ballads, to the second and fourth lines. Written or composed by obscure and often illiterate poets, these productions were frequently handed down only by tradition from generation to generation: it is to the taste and curiosity, perhaps only to the family pride, of collectors, that we owe the accident by which some of them were copied and preserved; the few that were ever printed, being destined for circulation only among the poorest class, were confided to the meanest typography and to flying sheets, or broadsides, as they are termed by collectors. Vast numbers of them - perhaps not inferior to the finest that have been preserved have perished forever. The first considerable collection of these ballads was published, with most agreeable and valuable notes, by Bishop THOMAS PERCY, in 1765, and it is to his example that we owe, not only the preservation of these invaluble relics, but the immense revolution produced, by their study and imitation, in the literature of the present century. It is no exaggeration to say that the old English ballads had the greatest share in bringing about that immense change in taste and feeling which characterizes the revival of romantic poetry; and that the relics of the rude old mosstrooping rhapsodists of the Border, in a great measure, generated the admirable inspirations of Walter Scott. Constructed, like the Homeric rhapsodies or the Romances of Spain, upon a certain regular model, these ballads, like the productions just mentioned, abound in certain regularly recurring passages, turns of expression and epithets: these must be regarded as the mechanical or received aids to the composer in his task; but these commonplaces are incessantly enlivened by some stroke of picturesque description, some vivid painting of natural objects, some burst of simple heroism, or some touch of pathos. Among the oldest and finest of these works I may cite "the grand old ballad " of Sir Patrick Spens, the Battle of Otterburne, Chevy Chase, the Death of Douglas, all commemorating some battle, foray, or military exploit |