Yet would he have a gentleman's name.
* * * * * *
I am like other clerkes which so frowardly them gyde,
That after they are once come unto promotion,
They give them to pleasure, their study set aside,
Their avarice covering with fained devotion.
Yet daily they preache, and have great derision
Against the rude lay men, and all for covetise,
Though their own conscience be blinded with that vice."
The reign of Henry VIII. was distinguished chiefly by satirists: and it says much for the courage of poets that they were almost the only men in that terrible period who dared open their mouths on the crying sins of Government. Skelton, Heywood, and Roy were men who amused themselves with the follies and vices of their contemporaries. When the sun of poetry rose in a more glowing form in Surrey, the ferocious king, so ready with the headsman's axe, quenched it in blood. John Skelton (b. 1460, d. 1529) was a clergyman, educated at Oxford. Erasmus declared him to be "Britannicarum Literarum Lumen et Decus"—"the light and ornament of Britain." He became Rector of Diss, in Norfolk; but, like Sterne at a later day, Skelton was overflowing with humour and satire rather than sermons, and so fell under the resentment of Nykke, Bishop of Norwich. He lashed with all the wonderful power of his merry muse the licentious ignorance of the monks and friars; and, soaring at higher game, attacked the swollen greatness of Cardinal Wolsey in a strain of the most daring invective. The incensed cardinal endeavoured to lay hold on him, and he would not have escaped scatheless out of his hands, had not the venerable John Islip, Abbot of Westminster, opened the sanctuary to him; and there Skelton lived secure for the remainder of his days, neither stinting his stinging lashes at the cardinal, nor suppressing his overflowing humour, which welled forth in a torrent of the most wild, sparkling, random, and rodomontade character. His amazing command of language, his never-failing and extraordinary rhymes, remind us of one man only, and that of last century—Hood. The airiness and irregularity of his lyrical measures equally suggest a comparison with that most untranslatable Swedish poet, Bellmann.