The English Moral Plays 385 
two sons whom they desire to educate together. Accordingly 
they place them in the keeping of the schoolmaster, Gnomaticus 
who has been recommended as “a man famous for his learning 
of woonderfull temperance, and highly esteemed for the diligence 
and carefull payne which he taketh with his Schollers.” The four 
boys enter the master’s home, and begin a course of study in which 
secular learning plays no exclusive part. Gnomaticus would not 
‘“holde in contempt” the instruction they have already received 
in the comedies of Terence, in Tully’s epistles and “ offices,” and 
in prosody; for in the “ wanton discourses” of Terence are many 
“morall enstructions”; yet since “the true christian must direct his 
steppes by the infallible rule of Gods word,” these profane authors 
are to be used only where they “seeme consonant to the holy 
scriptures.” His first lesson, therefore, is a long discourse, called a 
chapter, on man’s duty to God. This is followed shortly by another, 
expounding in the same way man’s duty to king, country, and 
parents. The younger brothers listen attentively to the instruction, 
and, in order to master it more thoroughly, turn the precepts 
into verse, whose “verie terminations and ceasures doe (as it 
were) serue for places of memorie.” But the elder sons find the 
moral bent of their master extremely distasteful, for they hanker 
after the life of the university, where besides the “lectures daily 
read of all the liberall sciences, of all languages, and of all morall 
discourses,” they might have also “choyse company of gallant 
young gentlemen.” But soon in' Antwerp, while their younger 
brothers are engaged in study, they trickily get leave of absence 
and seek pleasure in the house of the meretrix Lamia. Their father, 
though, hears of this escapade, and the four are forthwith sent 
to the near-by university of Douay, a newly founded school, where 
“the roote of euill hath hetherto had least skope, and exercise 
hath beene (and is) the more streightly obserued.” But even in 
that “pelting towne packed full of poore skollers,” the elder sons 
come to grief; what the parasite Echo has done in Antwerp to ruin 
them, the faithless servant Ambidexter continues there. While the 
less gifted younger sons by diligent application rise to positions 
of honor, one becoming a minister at Geneva, and the other the 
Palsgrave’s secretary, one of the older boys is hanged for robbery 
in the Palsgrave’s court, and the other is whipped in Geneva for 
fornication. 
Gascoigne’s play is of extreme interest and importance to the 
student of the moralities. The author had had a wider ex- 
perience than that of most religious dramatists, having become 
