This amiable scholar had been introduced at Court early in life; his “great friend and crony was Sir Thomas More;” so plain Anthony à Wood indicates the familiar intercourse of two great men. Elyot was a favourite with Henry the Eighth, and employed on various embassies, particularly on the confidential one to Rome to negotiate the divorce of Queen Katherine. To his public employments he alludes in his first work, “The Governor,” which “he had gathered as well of the sayings of most noble authors, Greek and Latin, as by his own experience, he being continually trained in some daily affairs of the public weal from his childhood.”
A passion for literature seems to have prevailed over the ambition of active life, and on his return from his last embassy he decided to write books “in our vulgar tongue,” on a great variety of topics, to instruct his countrymen. The diversity of his reading, and an unwearied pen, happily qualified, in this early age of the literature of a nation, a student who was impatient to diffuse that knowledge which he felt he only effectually possessed in the degree, and in the space, which he communicated it.
His first elaborate work is entitled, “The Boke of the Governor, devised by Sir Thomas Elyot,” 1531,—a work once so popular, that it passed through seven or eight editions, and is still valued by the collectors of our ancient literature.
“The Governor” is one of those treatises which, at an early period of civilization, when general education is imperfect, becomes useful to mould the manners and to inculcate the morals which should distinguish the courtier and the statesman. Elyot takes his future “Governor” in the arms of his nurse, and places the ideal being amid all the scenes which may exercise the virtues, or the studies which he developes. The work is dedicated to Henry the Eighth. The design, the imaginary personage, the author and the patron, are equally dignified. The style is grave; and it would not be candid in a modern critic to observe that, in the progress of time, the good sense has become too obvious, and the perpetual illustrations from ancient history too familiar. The erudition in philology of that day has become a schoolboy’s learning. They had then no other volumes to recur to of any authority, but what the ancients had left.
Elyot had a notion that, for the last thousand years, the world had deteriorated, and that the human mind had not expanded through the course of ages. When he compared the writers of this long series of centuries, the babbling, though the subtle, schoolmen, who had chained us down to their artificial forms, with the great authors of antiquity, there seemed an appearance of truth in his decision. Christianity had not yet exhibited to modern Europe the refined moralities of Seneca, and the curious knowledge of Plutarch, in the homilies of Saints and Fathers; nor had its histories of man, confined to our monkish annalists, emulated the narrative charms of Livy, nor the grandeur of Tacitus. Of the poets of antiquity, Elyot declared that the English language, at the time he wrote, could convey nothing equivalent, wanting even words to express the delicacies, “the turns,” and the euphony of the Latin verse.
A curious evidence of the jejune state of the public mind at this period appears in this volume. Here a learned and grave writer solemnly sets forth several chapters on “that honest pastime of dancing,” in which he discovers a series of modern allegories. The various figures and reciprocal movements between man and woman, “holding each other by the hand,” indicate the order, concord, prudence, and other virtues so necessary for the common weal. The singles and reprinses exhibit the virtue of circumspection, which excites the writer to a panegyric of the father of the reigning sovereign. These ethics of the dance contain some curious notices, and masters in the art might hence have embellished their treatises on the philosophy of dance; for “in its wonderful figures, which the Greeks do call idea, are comprehended so many virtues and noble qualities.” It is amusing to observe how men willingly become the dupes of their fancies, by affecting to discover motives and analogies, the most unconnected imaginable with the objects themselves. Long after our polished statesman wrote, the Puritan excommunicated the sinful dancer, and detected in the graceful evolutions of “the honour,” the “brawl,” and the “single,” with all their moral movements, the artifices of Satan, and the perdition of the souls of two partners, dancing too well. It was the mode of that age thus to moralise, or allegorise, on the common acts of life, and to sanction their idlest amusements by some religious motive. At this period, in France, we find a famous Veneur, Gaston Phebus, opening his treatise on “hunting” in the spirit that Elyot had opened to us the mysteries of dancing. “By hunting, we escape from the seven mortal sins, and therefore, the more we hunt, the salvation of our souls will be the more secure. Every good hunter in this world will have joyance, glee, and solace, (joyeuseté, liesse, et deduit,) and secure himself a place in Paradise, not perhaps in the midst, but in the suburbs, because he has shunned idleness, the root of all evil.”
“The Boke of the Governor” must now be condemned to the solitary imprisonment of the antiquary’s cell, who will pick up many curious circumstances relative to the manners of the age—always an amusing subject of speculation, when we contemplate on the gradations of social life. I suspect the world owed “The Governor” to a book more famous than itself—the Cortegiano of Castiglione, which appeared two years before the first edition of this work of Elyot, and to whose excellence Elyot could have been no stranger in his embassies to his holiness, and to the emperor. But of “The Governor,” and “The Cortegiano,” what can we now say, but that three centuries are fatal to the immortality of volumes, which, in the infancy of literature, seemed to have flattered themselves with a perpetuity of fame.
It was, however, a generous design, in an age of Latin, to attempt to delight our countrymen by “the vulgar tongue;” but these “first fruits,” as he calls them, gave their author a taste of the bitterness of “that tree of knowledge.”
In a subsequent work, “Of the Knowledge which maketh a Wise Man,” Elyot has recorded how he had laid himself open to “the vulgar.” In the circle of a Court there was equal peril in moralising, which was deemed to be a rebuke, as in applying rusty stories, which were considered as nothing less than disguised personalities. “The Boke” was not thankfully received. The persifleurs, those butterflies who carry waspish stings, accounted Sir Thomas to be of no little presumption, that “in noting other men’s vices he should correct magnificat.” This odd neologism of “magnificat” was a mystical coinage, which circulated among these aristocratic exclusives who, as Elyot describes them, “like a galled horse abiding no plaisters, be always knapping and kicking at such examples and sentences as they do feel sharp, or do bite them.” The chapters on “The Diversity of Flatterers,” and similar subjects, had made many “a galled jade wince;” and in applying the salve, he got a kick for the cure. They wondered why the knight wrote at all! “Other much wiser men, and better learned than he, do forbear to write anything.” They inscribed modern names to his ancient portraits. The worried author exclaims—“There be Gnathos in Spain as well as in Greece; Pasquils in England as well as in Rome, &c. If men will seek for them in England which I set in other places, I cannot let (hinder) them.” But in another work—“Image of Governance,” 1540—when he detailed “the monstrous living of the Emperor Heliogabalus,” and contrasted that gross epicurean with Severus, such a bold and open execration of the vices of a luxurious Court could not avoid being obvious to the royal sensualist and his companions, however the character and the tale were removed to a bygone age.
In this early attempt to cultivate “the vulgar tongue,” some cavilled at his strange terms. It is a striking instance of the simplicity of the critics at that early period of our language, that our author formally explains the word maturity—“a Latin word, which I am constrained to usurp, lacking a name in English, and which, though it be strange and dark, yet may be understood as other words late comen out of Italy and France, and made denizens among us.” Augustus Cæsar, it seems, had frequently in his mouth this word matura—do maturely! as “if he should have said, Do neither too much nor too little—too swiftly nor too slowly.” Elyot would confine the figurative Latin term to a metaphysical designation of the acts of men in their most perfect state, “reserving,” as he says, “the word ripeness to fruit and other things, separate from affairs, as we have now in usage.” Elyot exults in having augmented the English language by the introduction of this Latin term, now made English for the first time! It has flourished as well as this other, “the redolent savours of sweet herbs and flowers.” But his ear was not always musical, and some of his neologisms are less graceful—“an alective,” to wit; “fatigate,” to fatigue; “ostent,” to show, and to “sufficate some disputation.” Such were the first weak steps of the fathers of our language, who, however, culled for us many a flower among their cockle.