And after in age to geue my selfe to rest.
CORIDON.
Thou might haue brought one and set by our village.
CORNIX.
What man I might not for lacke of cariage.
To cary mine owne selfe was all that euer I might,
And sometime for ease my sachell made I light."
ECLOGUE I.
Returning to England, after some years of residence abroad, with his mind broadened and strengthened by foreign travel, and by the study of the best authors, modern as well as ancient, Barclay entered the church, the only career then open to a man of his training. With intellect, accomplishments, and energy possessed by few, his progress to distinction and power ought to have been easy and rapid, but it turned out quite otherwise. The road to eminence lay by the "backstairs," the atmosphere of which he could not endure. The ways of courtiers—falsehood, flattery, and fawning—he detested, and worse, he said so, wherefore his learning, wit and eloquence found but small reward. To his freedom of speech, his unsparing exposure and denunciation of corruption and vice in the Court and the Church, as well as among the people generally, must undoubtedly be attributed the failure to obtain that high promotion his talents deserved, and would otherwise have met with. The policy, not always a successful one in the end, of ignoring an inconvenient display of talent, appears to have been fully carried out in the instance of Barclay.
His first preferment appears to have been in the shape of a chaplainship in the sanctuary for piety and learning founded at Saint Mary Otery in the County of Devon, by Grandison, Bishop of Exeter; and to have come from Thomas Cornish, Suffragan Bishop of Bath and Wells under the title of the Bishop of Tyne, "meorum primitias laborum qui in lucem eruperunt," to whom, doubtless out of gratitude for his first appointment, he dedicated "The Ship of Fools." Cornish, amongst the many other good things he enjoyed, held, according to Dugdale, from 1490 to 1511, the post of warden of the College of S. Mary Otery, where Barclay no doubt had formed that regard and respect for him which is so strongly expressed in the dedication.