Popes. Three or four unsuccessful attempts were made in the course of this and the previous century,—the latest in 1496-to establish a university in Dublin. Several colleges were founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the reign of Henry VIII., among which we may specify Christ Church, the largest college at the former university (which, however, was originally planned by the magnificent Wolsey on a far larger scale), and the noble foundation of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In the period now before us our attention will be directed to three subjects;-the poets, whether English or Scotch, the state and progress of learning,—and the prose writers. The manner in which the great and complex movement of the Reformation influenced for good or evil the development of literature, is too wide a subject to be fully considered here. Something, however, will be said under this head, when we come to sketch the rise of the 'new learning,' or study of the Humanities, in England, and inquire into the causes which rendered its growth fitful and intermittent.

Poetry and Romance :-Hardyng, Malory, Hawes, Barclay, Skelton, Surrey, Wyat; first Poet Laureate.

3. The poets of this period, at least on the English side of the border, were of small account. The middle of the fifteenth century witnessed the expulsion of the English from France; and a time of national humiliation is unfavourable to the production of poetry. If, indeed, humiliation become permanent, and involve subjection to the stranger, the plaintive wailings of the elegiac Muse are naturally evoked; as we see in the instances of Ireland and Wales. But where a nation is merely disgraced, not crushed, it keeps silence, and waits for a better day. For more than thirty years after the loss of the French provinces, England was distracted and weakened by the civil wars of the Roses. This was also a time unfavourable to poetry, the makers of which then and long afterwards depended on the patronage of the noble and wealthy, a patronage which, in that time of fierce passions, alternate suffering, and universal disquietude, was not likely to be steadily maintained. Why the fifty years which followed the victory of Bosworth should have been so utterly barren of good poetry, it is less easy to see. All that can be said is, that this was an age of preparation, in which men disentombed and learned to appreciate old treasures, judging that they were much better employed than in attempting to produce new matter, with imperfect means and models. Towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII. were produced the Songs and Sonnettes of the

friends Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyat; and Sackville wrote the Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates in the last year of Mary.

Scotland seems to have been about a century later than England in arriving at the stage of literary culture which Chaucer and his contemporaries illustrate. Several poets of no mean order arose in that country during the period now in question. Of some of these, namely, Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, Lyndsay, and Henryson, we shall presently have to make particular mention.

4. John Hardyng was in early life an esquire to Harry Percy, commonly called Hotspur. After seeing his lord fall on the field of Shrewsbury, he took service with Sir Robert Umfravile, and remained till his death a dependent on that family. He wrote-in that common seven-line stanza which we have called the Chaucerian heptastich'a Chronicle of Britain, which comes down to 1462, ending with an address to Edward' IV. urging him to be merciful to the Lancastrians, and to make just allowance for previous circumstances.

5. Romance in one shape or other furnished the educated classes with intellectual amusement throughout the fifteenth as in the fourteenth century. The prose romance of the Saint Graal (see Prel. Ch. II. §68) was translated into English verse by Henr Lonelich in the middle of the fifteenth century; his version along with the original, was edited by Mr. Furnivall in 1861 for the Roxburghe Club. Perhaps it was the success of this translation which led Sir Thomas Malory, about 1470, to produce in English prose the remainder of the romances connected with the Saint Graal, under the title of The Historie of King Arthur and his Noble Knights of the Round Table. He made his compilation 'out of certeyn bookes of Frensshe,' namely, the prose romances of Merlin, Lancelot, Tristan, the Queste du Saint Graal and the Mort Artur. Caxton printed Malory's work in 1485. It has in later times been frequently edited, e.g. by Southey in 1817, by Mr. T. Wright in 1858, and by Mr. Conybeare in 1868.

6. In spite of this prevalent taste for romance, we have seen that a great mind like Chaucer's could abandon a track of thought and invention which was leading farther and farther away from reality, and paint the world which he saw before him; nor did he spare ridicule for the hackneyed style of the romancist, as we saw in Sir Thopas. Stephen Hawes, author of the Pastime of Pleasure, had not enough originality and substance in him to follow such an example. Still, writing for a refined audience (he was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII.), he could see that if battles and courses and the feats of chivalry were to con

tinue to please, they must be justified by a new treatment. Scenes, the like of which are going on all round us, need no excuse for painting; their interest is immediate; they come home, as Lord Bacon says, 'to our business and bosoms.' But when society is no longer in a state of war, when adventures are fewer and tamer, then, if narratives of strife delight us still, the poet is tempted to introduce a hidden meaning into his representations, and, under the forms of material war, to paint the eternal conflict that rages between the faculties and the desires of the human mind. Thus arises Allegory, a style which at once gratifies the poet with the sense of having come to something more profound and real than if he had remained among externals, and flatters the intelligence of his readers in the same proportion. Hawes, therefore, allegorizes; and while he writes of giants with three heads, and enchanted castles, and imprisoned damsels, and employs all the gorgeous imagery of old romance, he offers to the cultivated and intellectual few a feast of reason; he invites them to trace, under all the exciting adventures of his hero, the progress of a mind subjected to a scientific course of education.

The substance of the poem under consideration is briefly this. Grand Amour, walking in a meadow, meets with Fame, from whom he receives a 'swete report' of the beauty and excellence of the fayre lady, La Bell Pucell, who dwells in the Tower of Musike. He is eager to see her; but first he

is directed to the Tower of Doctrine, where, and in dependent towers, he is duly instructed in the 'seven sciences,' which are simply the old Trivium and Quadrivium of the schools, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Mu sic, and Astronomy. In the course of his indoctrination, he naturally, therefore, visits the Tower of Musike, and meets La Bell Pucell. She grants him her love; but her friends, she tells him, will soon take her home to her palace in a distant land, where she will be closely guarded by giants and dragons; he, on his part, must complete his education in the Tower of Chivalry, if he hopes to force his way through all obstacles to her feet. Their parting is thus prettily described :

'Forth must I [La Pucell] sayle without longer delaye.
It is full see; my frendes will come soone;

Therefore I praye you to go hence your waye.

It draweth fast now towarde the none.'

:

'Madame,' qucd I [Grand Amour], 'your pleasure shall be done.' Wyth wofull herte and grete syghes, ofte

I kyssed her lyppes, that were swete and softe.

She unto me nor I to her colde speke,
And as of that it was no grete wondre,
Our hertes swelled as that they would breke,
The fyre of love was so sore kept under.
Whan I from her should depart asundre,
Wyth her fayre head she dyd lowe enclyne,
And in lykewise so dyd I with myne.

Grand Amour duly visits the Tower of Chivalry, and is there trained in martial accomplishments and knightly virtues; he is then dubbed a knight by king Melyzyus, and proceeds on his adventurous journey in quest of La Bell Pucell. This part of the poem much resembles romances of the old simple type, such for instance as those which are given in Ellis's Specimens. The last and decisive combat which the hero has to sustain, is with the Monster of the Seven Metals, a dragon named Privy Malice. He runs the creature through after a terrific conflict, and then

Ryght ther wythall the dragon to-brast,

And out ther flew, ryght blacke and tedyous,
A foule Ethyope, which such smoke did cast,
That all ye ylond was full tenebrous;

It thundered loude wyth clappes tempestious,
Then all the ladyes were full sore adred,

They thought none other but that I was ded.

But the air clears presently, and he sees his lady's castle. All difficulties being now overcome, Grand Amour marries La Bell Pucell. Here the poem might have been expected to end; but it is not so. After many years of consummate happiness, Grand Amour is one morning startled by the entrance of an unknown guest, who tells him that his name is Age. He introduces two companions, Policy and Avarice, whose society the hero assiduously frequents, till stopped by the visit of Death. Then come Confession, Contrition, and Satisfaction, and he dies. Even this is not all :

Out of my body my soul then it went
To Purgatory, for to be purified,
That after that it might be glorified.

His name and memory are enrolled by Fame for perpetual honour with those of the nine worthies' of whom three are of the pagan order of things, Hector, Alexander, and Cæsar, three of the Jewish, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus,-and three of the Christian, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey de Bouillon.

Of the exceeding crudity of the versification of this poem, it is difficult to form a just idea, except by reading a number of

pages in succession. Of the degree in which these minions of a court, the affected euphuists of an earlier generation than Lyly, would have Latinized our language could they have had their way, a conception may more easily be gained. The fine old English words which abound in Chaucer, and the loss of many of which in the modern language is deeply to be regretted, do not appear in Hawes; instead of them we are treated to hundreds of such exquisite phrases as are found in the following stanza :

Her redolente wordes of swete influence,
Degouted vapoure moost aromatyke,
And made conversyon of my complacence;
Her depurèd and her lusty rhetoryke

My courage reformed that was so lunatyke,
My sorowe defeted and my mynde did modefy,
And my dolourous herte began to pacyfy.

Hawes must have died after the year 1509, since we have among his poems a Coronation ode celebrating the accession of Henry VIII.

7. Alexander Barclay, a priest, chaplain to the college of St. Mary Ottery in Devonshire, translated in 1508, out of Laten, Frenche, and Doche,' to use his own words, Sebastian Brandt's then widely popular poem, the 'Ship of Fools.' This work has a purpose partly satirical, partly didactic, but chiefly the latter; it is, in fact, a sermon in many heads on the corrupt manners of the age, and may be said to stand in nearly the same relation to ordinary sermons as that in which the Proverbs stand to the books of the Prophets. Brandt was an eminent professor and jurisconsult of Strasburg, who died in 1520. He composed the poem originally in German, and commenced to translate it into Latin; this task, however, he soon transferred to his disciple Locher, who completed it, and dedicated the translation to his master, in 1497, giving it the title of 'Narragonia,' which seems to be a barbarous compound, made up of Narr, the German for fool, and the Greek verb äyɛu, to conduct. A French version appeared about the same time, under the title of 'La Nef des Folz du Monde.' From these three versions Barclay compiled his English Ship of Fools,' printed by Pynson, side by side with Locher's Latin, in 1509. His rendering is by no means literal, and considerably more diffuse than the original; the additions being often characterized by much spirit and graphic power. Most of the work is, like the Pastime of Pleasure, in the Chaucerian heptastich, but towards the end he introduces a new octave stanza, with three rimes, thus arranged, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 3.

6

The prose prologue of Brandt and Locher is freely rendered