XV.—REVIVAL OF LEARNING.
The discontinuation of bodily exercises afforded a proportionable quantity of leisure time for the cultivation of the mind; so that the manners of mankind were softened by degrees, and learning, which had been so long neglected, became fashionable, and was esteemed an indispensable mark of a polite education. Yet some of the nobility maintained for a long time the old prejudices in favour of the ancient mode of nurture, and preferred exercise of the body to mental endowments; such was the opinion of a person of high rank, who said to Richard Pace, secretary to king Henry VIII., "It is enough for the sons of noblemen to wind their horn and carry their hawke fair, and leave study and learning to the children of meaner people." [37] Many of the pastimes that had been countenanced by the nobility, and sanctioned by their example, in the middle ages, grew into disrepute in modern times, and were condemned as vulgar and unbecoming the notice of a gentleman. "Throwing the hammer and wrestling," says Peacham, in his Complete Gentleman, published in 1622, "I hold them exercises not so well beseeming nobility, but rather the soldiers in the camp and the prince's guard." On the contrary, sir William Forest, in his Poesye of Princelye Practice, a MS. in the Royal Library, [38] written in the year 1548, laying down the rules for the education of an heir apparent to the crown, or prince of the blood royal, writes thus:
So must a prince, at some convenient brayde,
In featis of maistries bestowe some diligence:
Too ryde, runne, leape, or caste by violence
Stone, barre, or plummett, or suche other thinge,
It not refusethe any prince or kynge.
However, I doubt not both these authors spoke agreeably to the taste of the times in which they lived. Barclay, a more early poetic writer, in his Eclogues, first published in 1508, has made a shepherd boast of his skill in archery; to which he adds,
I can dance the raye; I can both pipe and sing,
If I were mery; I can both hurle and sling;
I runne, I wrestle, I can well throwe the barre,
No shepherd throweth the axeltree so farre;
If I were mery, I could well leape and spring;
I were a man mete to serve a prince or king.