Grating on scrannel pipes of wretched straw.”

Awaiting that blissful time, however, we are content to enjoy the “music of Apollo’s lute” as it comes to us, without inspecting too curiously the fingers that touch it, so long as they be clean. And we are willing to believe that if our Catholic poets have had less than their fair share of attention, it has been their misfortune or their fault, and not because of any sectarian cabal to crowd them from the thrones which may belong to them of right among “the inheritors of unfulfilled renown.”

To tell the truth, indeed, such of them as we find prior to the time of Elizabeth have few claims on our regret. We count, of course, from the Reformation; when all poets were Catholics, there was nothing peculiarly distinctive in being a Catholic poet. The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, translated out of Latin, Frenche and Doche into Englyshe tonge by Alexander Barclay, preste, is too well known to come fairly into our category. But the Shyp of Folys belongs, after all, at least as much to Sylvester Brandt as to Barclay, and the more original works of the good monk of Ely—his Eglogues (though these, too, were based on Mantuanus and Æneas Sylvius, afterwards pope), his Figure of our Mother

Holy Church oppressed by the French King—even those trenchant satires, in which he demolished Master Skelton, the heretical champion, are sufficiently forgotten to be his passport. Another of his translations, The Castle of Labour, from the French, may have suggested to Thomson his Castle of Indolence—to the latter bard a more congenial mansion.

The “mad, mery wit” which won for Heywood, the epigrammatist, the favor of Henry VIII. and his daughter Mary seems vapid enough to us. Perhaps it was like champagne, which must be drunk at once, and, being kept for a century or two, grows flat and insipid. The Play called the four P’s, being a new and merry Enterlude of a Palmer, Pardoner, Poticary, and Pedlar, would scarcely run for a hundred nights on the metropolitan stage. His Epigrams, six hundred in Number, which were thought uproariously funny by his own generation, ours finds rather dismal reading. We somehow miss the snap of even that wonderful design, his Dialogue containing in effect the number of al the Proverbes in the English tongue, which all England was shaking its sides over long after Shakspere had flung his rarest pearls at its feet. Heywood’s great work is an allegory entitled, The Spider and the Flie, “wherein,” says a polite contemporary, “he dealeth so profoundly and beyond all measure of skill that neither he himself that made it, neither any one that readeth it, can reach to the meaning thereof.” It is a sort of religious parable, the flies representing the Catholics, and the spiders the Protestants, to whom enter presently, dea ex machinâ, Queen Mary with a broom. Heywood “was inflexibly attached to the Catholic cause,” and when, the broom-wielder

having gone to another sphere, the spiders got the ascendant, he betook himself to Mechlin, where he died in exile for conscience’ sake. Therein Chaucer could have done no better.

Can we enroll Sir Thomas More among our tuneful company? Brave old Sir Thomas was a Catholic certainly—a Catholic of the Catholics—and he wrote poetry, too, or what passed for such. It is one of the many heinous charges brought against him by worthy Master Skelton in his Pithie, Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes—his going about

“With his poetry

And his sophistry

To mock and make a lie.”