Another poet had occasion to adopt the same mode of escape which Buchanan successfully accomplished, but with less happy results. This was Nicodemus Frischlin, a German poet and philosopher, born in the duchy of Würtemberg in 1547. At an early age he showed great talents; honours clustered thickly on his brow. At the age of twenty years he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres at Tubingen; he received from the Emperor Rudolph the poetic crown with the title of chevalier, and was made Count Palatin as a reward for his three panegyrics composed in honour of the emperors of the House of Austria. Certainly Fortune smiled upon her favourite, but Envy raised up many enemies, who were eager to find occasion against the successful poet. He afforded them a pretext in his work De laudibus vitae rusticae, which, in spite of its innocent title, grievously offended the nobles, who were already embittered against him on account of his arrogance and turbulence, and his keen and unsparing satire. So bitter was their hostility that the poet was compelled to leave Tubingen, and became a wandering philosopher, sometimes teaching in schools, always pouring forth poems, elegies, satires, tragedies, comedies, and epics. Being eager to publish some of his works and not having sufficient means, he applied to the Duke of Würtemberg for a subsidy, at the same time furiously attacking his old opponents. This so exasperated the chief men of the Court, that they persuaded the Duke to recall Frischlin; but instead of finding a welcome from his old patron, he was cast into prison, in order that he might unlearn his presumption, and acquire the useful knowledge that modesty is the chief ornament of a learned man. But Frischlin did not agree with another poet's assertion:—
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."
Having raged and stormed, and tried in vain to obtain release, he resolved to escape. From his prison window he let himself down by a rope made out of his bed-clothes, but unfortunately the rope broke and the poor poet fell upon the hard rocks beneath his chamber window and was injured fatally. Frischlin was considered one of the best Latin poets of post-classical times; but his genius was marred by his immoderate and bitter temper, which caused him to imagine that the gentle banter and jocular remarks of his acquaintances were insults to be repaid by angry invective and bitter sarcasm, with which his writings abound.
Clement Marot was one of the most famous of early French poets, and the creator of the school of naïve poetry in which La Fontaine afterwards so remarkably excelled. His poetical version of the Psalms was read and sung in many lands; and in spite of prohibition copies could not be printed so fast as they were eagerly bought. They were at one time as popular in the Court of Henry II. of France as they were amongst the Calvinists of Geneva and Holland. In 1521 we find him fighting in the Duke of Alençon's army, when he was wounded at the battle of Pavia. Then his verses caused their author suffering, and he was imprisoned on the charge of holding heretical opinions. His epistles in poetry written to the King contain a record of his life, his fear of imprisonment, his flight, his arrest by his enemies of the Sorbonne, his release by order of the King, and his protestations of orthodoxy. But he seems to have adopted the principles of the Reformation, and France was no safe place for him. In Geneva and Piedmont he found resting-places, and died in 1544. His translation of the Psalms into harmonious verse, which was sung both by the peasants and the learned, was the cause of his persecution by the doctors of the Sorbonne. He complains bitterly to the Lyons printer, Dolet, that many obscene and unworthy poems were ascribed to him and printed amongst his works of which he was not the author. As an example of his verse I quote the beginning of Psalm cxli.:—
"Vers l'Eternel des oppressez le pere
Je m'en iray, luy monstrant l'impropere
Que l'on me faict, luy ferai ma priere
A haulte voix, qu'il ne jette en arriere
Mes piteux cris, car en lui seul j'espere."
It is not often that a poet loses his head for a single couplet, but this seems to have been the fate of Caspar Weiser, Professor of Lund in Sweden. At first he showed great loyalty to his country, and wrote a panegyric on the coronation of Charles XI., King of Sweden. But a short time afterwards he appears to have changed his political opinions, for when the city was captured by the Danes in 1676, Weiser met the conqueror, and greeted him with the words:—
Perge Triumphator reliquas submittere terras,
Sic redit ad Dominum, quod fuit ante, suum.
This verse was fatal to him. The Swedish monarch recovered his lost territory; the Danes were expelled, and the poor poet was accused of treason and beheaded.
The same hard fate befell John Williams in 1619, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered, on account of two poems, Balaam's Ass and Speculum Regis, the MSS. of which he foolishly sent secretly in a box to King James. The monarch was always fearful of assassination, and as one of the poems foretold his speedy decease, the prophet incurred the King's wrath and suffered death for his pains.
A single poem was fatal to Deforges, entitled Vers sur l'arrestation du Prétendant d'Angleterre, en 1749. It commences with the following lines:—