Skelton’s verse was chiefly used by poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for satirical and burlesque poetry. One of its chief cultivators was John Taylor, the Water-poet. A list of Skeltonic poems is given in Dyce’s edition of Skelton’s poems, i. introduction, pp. cxxviii-cxxix.
C. Revival of the old four-beat alliterative verse in the Modern English period.
§ 72. If after what precedes any doubt were possible as to the scansion of the verses quoted on p. 113 from the Prologue to the Early Modern English comedy of Gammer Gurton’s Needle, this doubt would be removed at once by the following couplet and by the accents put over the second line of it by the sixteenth-century metrician, George Gascoigne[116]:
No wight in this world | that wealth can attayne,
Unlésse hè bèléve | thàt áll ìs bùt váyne.
For the rhythm of these lines is perfectly identical with that of the lines of the above-mentioned prologue, and also with that of the alliterative line quoted ten years later (A. D. 1585), and called tumbling-verse by King James VI in his Revlis and Cavtelis, viz.:
Fetching fúde for to féid it | fast fúrth of the Fárie.
This is the very same rhythm in which a good many songs and ballads of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are written, as e.g. the well-known ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury, which begins with the following stanzas[117]:
An áncient stóry | I’le téll you anón