Another poet and scholar not less scurvily treated, and to whom we have somehow taken a wonderful fancy, was George Etheridge, a fellow of Oxford and Regius Professor of Greek there under Mary. Persecuted for Popery by Queen Elizabeth, he lost his university preferments, but “established a private seminary at Oxford for the instruction of Catholic youth in the classics, music, and logic.” He also “practised physic with much reputation,” greatly, no doubt, to the joy of his pupils. A friend of Leland, the antiquarian, his accomplishments were varied and his learning profound. “He was an able mathematician,” says a contemporary, “and one of the most excellent vocal and instrumental musicians in England, but he chiefly delighted in the lute and lyre; a most elegant poet, and a most exact composer of English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew verses, which he used to set to the harp with the greatest skill.” Of all these elegant productions one only survives—a Greek encomium, we are sorry to say, on that royal reprobate, Henry VIII.; and the memory of this pious scholar of the sixteenth century has suffered the slight of being confounded with the graceless dramatist of the seventeenth.
A cockle-shell weathers the storm that wrecks a frigate, and a nursery rhyme has outlived Etheridge’s poetry and Morley’s erudition. If widespread renown be a test of merit, The Merry Tales of the Madman of Gotham must be a work of genius. “Scholars and gentlemen” temp. Henry VIII. “accounted it a book full of wit and mirth,” and the scholars and babies of three
centuries later approve that judgment. The author of this famous poem was Dr. Andrew Borde, or Andreas Perforatus, as he preferred to call himself, “esteemed in his time a noted poet, a witty and ingenious person, and an excellent physician,” serving in the latter capacity, it is said, to Henry VIII. He was the original of the stage Merry-andrew, “going to fairs and the like, where he would gather a crowd, to whom he prescribed by humorous speeches couched in such language as caused mirth and wonderfully propagated his fame.” He wrote, besides the Merry Tales, The Mylner of Abington, a satire called the Introduction of Knowledge, and various medical works giving curious details of the domestic life of the time.
Many others we might catalogue who were better churchmen than poets—William Forrest, Queen Mary’s chaplain, whose gorgeously-illuminated MSS. show that he, at least, had a due appreciation of his Saincted Griseilde and his Blessed Joseph; or Richard Stonyhurst, who, like Heywood, died in exile for his faith, and who merits immortality for having written probably the worst translation of Virgil ever achieved by mortal man. It was in the amazing hexameter of the time, that “foul, lumbering, boisterous, wallowing measure,” as Nashe calls it, which represented to Sir Philip Sidney and his coterie the grace and melody of Virgil’s line. The wits laughed it to death, and we read its epitaph in Hall’s parody:
“Manhood and Garboiles shall he chaunt with changed feet.”
On names like these, however, we have not space to dwell. Not even neglect can sanctify them. We are at the dawning of that glorious outburst of creative genius which made
the Elizabethan era a splendor to all times and lands, and worthier subjects await us.
At the outset we must prepare for something like a disappointment in the scanty list of Catholic poets which even this prolific period could furnish. Looking back on it, all England seems to have been furiously bent on making poetry enough to last it for all years to come. Englishmen, we know, in those days did other things—circumnavigated the globe once or twice, and conquered a continent or so—in the intervals of rhyming; but the wonder is how they found leisure for such trifles from the absorbing business of the hour. Poetry, in that electric century of song, appears to have been the Englishman’s birthright; Apollo possessed the nation. The judge scribbled odes upon the bench; the soldier turned a sonnet and a battery together; the sailor made a song as he brought his ship into action; the bishop preached indifferently in sermons and satires—it was hard at times to tell which; the office-seeker preferred his claims in rhyme, and his complaints were “married to immortal verse”—it is lucky our own age is more given to office-seeking than to poetry; the bricklayer dropped his trowel and was a mighty dramatist; the condemned, like André Chénier at a later day—“the ruling passion strong in death”—strung couplets on the very steps of the scaffold. Even princes were smitten with the general madness, and, catching something of the general inspiration, made verses which were no worse than a prince’s verses ought to be, and were often better than their laws. Were we poet-haters like Carlyle, we should have ample food for disgust in exploring that fiddling age. At every step in the
most unlikely corners we stumble upon the inevitable rhymer.
In the Mermaid, where we drop in for a quiet cup of canary, and perhaps a glimpse of that rising dramatist, William Shakspere, we find him bawling madrigals over his sack; we overhear him muttering of “hearts” and “darts” as we take our constitutional in Powle’s Walk; the very boatman who wherries us across the Thames is a Water-Poet, as though poets were classified like rats, and will importune us before we land to buy one of his four-score volumes; like black care, Rhyme sits behind the horseman and climbs the brazen galley. We fly from him to the camp; and there is that terrible fellow, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, whom we heard of anon slaughtering “vulgar Irishry,” men, women, and children, like so many rabbits—there is that martial hero, fresh from his last battue of unarmed peasants, simpering over the composition of “godly and virtuous hymns.” We ship with Drake for a trip to the Azores “to do God’s work,” and incidentally to fill our pockets, perhaps, as somehow or other “God’s work” usually did for that pious and lucky mariner. Scandit æratas vitiosa naves—the rogue Apollo is there before us. We have scarce got over our sea-sickness before our ingenuous skipper will be asking our opinion of the commendatory verses which “he hath writ,” he explains—a fine blush mantling under his bronze—“for his very good friend, Sir Gervase Peckham’s Report of the Late Discoveries.” We peep over my Lord of Pembroke’s shoulder as he sits writing in his cabinet—it is a liberty that by virtue of his privilege a well-bred chronicler may take. By his knit brows and preoccupied air it is some weighty state