When engaged in public life, a collegiate fellowship appeared to him to offer supreme felicity. He writes thus,—“Ascham to his friends: who is able to maintain his life at Cambridge, knows not what a felicity he hath.” Such was the conviction of one who had long lived in courts.
But when we consider that Ascham was Latin secretary to Edward the Sixth, to Mary, and to Elizabeth, and intimately acquainted with the transactions of these cabinets, with the sovereigns, and the ministers; and during three years held a personal intercourse with the highest foreign court;—we must regret, if we no not censure, the man who, possessing these rare advantages, with a vigorous intellect, and a felicitous genius, has left the world in silence. Assuredly, in Ascham, we have lost an English Comines, who would have rivalled our few memoir-writers, who, though with pens more industrious, had not eyes more observant, nor heads more penetrating, than this secretary of three sovereigns.
There is, however, reason to conclude, that he himself was not insensible to these higher claims which his station might have urged on his genius and his diligence. Every night during his residence abroad, which was of no short period, he was occupied by filling his Diary, which has not, in any shape, come down to us. He has also himself told, that he had written a book on “The Cockpit,” one of the recreations of “a courtly gentleman.” We cannot imagine that such writings, by the hand of Ascham, would be destroyed by his family, who knew how to value them. A modern critic, indeed, considers it fortunate for Ascham’s credit, that this work on “The Cockpit” has escaped from publication. The criticism is fallacious, for if an apology for cock-fighting be odious, the author’s reputation is equally hurt by the announcement as by the performance. But the truth is, that such barbarous sports, like the bear-baiting of England and the bull-fights of Spain, have had their advocates. Queen Elizabeth had appointed Ascham her bear-keeper; and he was writing in his character when disclosing the mysteries of the cockpit. But the genius of our author was always superior to his subject; and this was a treatise wherein he designed to describe “all kinds of pastimes joined with labour used in open place, and in the day-light.” The curious antiquary, at least, must regret the loss of Ascham’s “Cockpit.”
Ascham lived in the ferment of the Reformation: zealously attached to the new faith under Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth, how did he preserve himself during the intermediate reign, when he partook of the favours of the papistical sovereign? His master and friend, the learned Sir John Cheke, had only left for himself the choice of a recantation, or a warrant for execution; but of Ascham’s good fortune, nothing is known but its mystery. The novel religion had, however, early heated the passions, and narrowed the judgment, of Ascham. He wrote at a period when the Romanist and the Protestant reciprocally blackened each other. Ascham not only abhorred all Italians as papists, but all Italian books as papistical. He invokes the interposition of the civil magistrate against Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose volumes were then selling in every shop. Baretti strikes at his manes with his stiletto-pen, in an animated passage;[2] and Warton is indignant at his denunciation of our ancient romances, of which the historian of our poetry says, “he has written in the spirit of an early Calvinistic preacher, rather than as a sensible critic and a polite scholar”—he who, in his sober senses, was eminently both.
We may lament that the first steps in every revolution are taken in darkness, and that the reaction of opinions and prejudices is itself accompanied by errors and prejudices of its own. The bigotry of the new faith was not inferior to the old. The reforming Archbishop Grindal substituted the dull and barbarous Palingenius, Sedulius, and Prudentius, for the great classical authors of antiquity. The Reformation opened with fanaticism; and men were reformers before they were philosophers. Had Ascham, a learned scholar, and a man of fine genius, been blessed with the prescient eye of philosophy, he had perceived that there was not more papistry in the solemn “Trionfi” of Petrarch, and not less “honest pastime” in a “merrie tale” of Boccaccio, than in cock-fighting and dicing; and that with these works the imagination of the public was gradually stepping out of a supernatural world of folio legends, into a world of true nature, which led to that unrivalled era which immortalised the closing century.
We must recollect that the bigotry of the Reformation, or that which afterwards assumed the form of puritanism, in their absurd notion of the nature of idolatry attached to every picture and every statue on sacred subjects, eventually banished the fine arts from England for a long century, and retarded their progress even to our own days. A curious dialogue has been preserved by Strype, whose interlocutors are Queen Elizabeth and a Dean. The Dean having obtained some of those fine German paintings, those book-miniatures which are of the most exquisite finish, placed them in her majesty’s prayer-book. For this the queen proscribed the dean, as she did those beautiful illuminations, as “Romish and idolatrous;” and with a Gothic barbarism, strange in a person with her Attic taste, commanded the clergy “to wash all pictures out of their walls.” To this circumstance the painter Barry ascribes the backward state of the fine arts, which so long made us a by-word among the nations of Europe, and even induced the critical historian of the arts, Winkelman, to imagine that the climate of England presented an internal obstruction to the progress of art itself; it was too long supposed that no Englishman could ever aspire to be an artist of genius. The same principle which urged Ascham to denounce all Italian books, instigated his royal pupil “to wash out all pictures;” and even so late as the reign of George the Third, when the artists of England made a noble offer, gratuitously to decorate our churches with productions of their own composition, the Bishop of London forbade the glorious attempt to redeem English art from the anathema of foreign critics.
Ascham, whose constitutional delicacy often impeded his studies, died prematurely. The parsimonious queen emphatically rated his value by declaring, that she would rather have lost ten thousand pounds—no part of which, during his life, the careless yet not the neglected Ascham ever shared.
Roger Ascham was truly what Pope has described Gay to have been, “in wit a man, simplicity a child;” and he has developed his own character in his letters. Latin and English, they are among the earliest specimens of that domestic and literary correspondence in which the writer paints himself without reserve, with all the warm touches of a free pencil, gay sallies of the moment, or sorrows of the hour, confiding to the bosom of a friend the secrets of his heart and his condition; such as we have found in the letters of Gray and of Shenstone.
The works of Ascham, which are collected in a single volume, remain for the gratification of those who preserve a pure taste for the pristine simplicity of our ancient writers. His native English, that English which we have lost, but which we are ever delighted to recover, after near three centuries, is still critical without pedantry, and beautiful without ornament: and, which cannot be said of the writings of Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Thomas More, the volume of Ascham is indispensable in every English library, whose possessor in any way aspires to connect together the progress of taste and of opinion in the history of our country.