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THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



which seemed under Wickliffe's leading to promise so much, 

 appeared to have shared the fate of all premature efforts. The 

 severe persecution of the Lollards under the Lancastrian kings, 

 the errors and excesses of their own leaders, and the pre-occu- 

 pation of men's minds with the stern realities of civil war, 

 seemed between them to have been wholly fatal to the reform- 

 ing spirit which Wickliffe had kindled; though subsequent 

 events showed that there was more of his spirit left among 

 the masses in England than might have been thought. And 

 the slaughter and ruin of so many of the cultivated classes 

 during the civil conflicts of course reduced the number of those 

 for whom books would be written far below what it had once 

 been. From all these causes, the century between the death of 

 Chaucer and the re-settlement of the English crown upon the 

 family of Tudor, which we have taken as the second period of 

 English literary history, was one extremely unfavourable to 

 literature, and singularly barren of any valuable literary fruit. 

 Indeed, though England produced many writers during this 

 century, there is not one of them who, in almost any other age, 

 would be thought worthy of mention. The best known among 

 them are two poets, Occleve and Lydgate, the former a lawyer, 

 and apparently a contemporary of, though very much younger 

 than, Chaucer ; the latter, a monk, who flourished a few years 

 later, and who was a skilful versifier, though no poet. 



Yet, with all its barrenness, one event makes the later years 

 of the fifteenth century a great epoch in the history of our 

 literature, and that is the introduction into England of the art 

 of printing, which took place probably between 1470 and 1480. 

 This art had been used in Germany, its birthplace, for twenty 

 or thirty years previously ; but the honour of its introduction 

 into England is due to William Caxton, himself a learned and 

 laborious scholar and author, who, during a residence abroad, 

 acquired the art which he imparted to his countrymen. Before 

 the close of the century, Caxton found many imitators, and 

 printing-presses became numerous, not only in London, but in 

 Oxford and other cities. 



In Scotland, during the same period, the literary spirit was 

 far more active than in England. A national literature in 

 Scotland had begun with Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, 

 who flourished during the latter half of the fourteenth century, 

 and was thus a contemporary of Chaucer. His principal work 

 is a long poem in which he relates the adventures of Eobert 

 Bruce. The literature, of which he may be said to have been 

 the founder, was as thoroughly national as that of England ; 

 and the language in which it was composed, though not identical 

 with the literary language of England at the same period, was 

 not less highly cultivated. It was the language of the Scottish 

 Court, and of the educated classes in Scotland ; and it bears 

 much the same relation to the present Lowland Scotch dialect 

 that the literary English of the same date does to the ordi- 

 nary spoken language of to-day in England. The early Scotch 

 writers themselves were careful to assert that they wrote 

 Scotch, not English. Among the successors of Barbour, during 

 the fifteenth century, the most celebrated are Wyntoun, the 

 author of a metrical chronicle, principally of the history of 

 Scotland ; King James I. of Scotland, the romantic story of 

 whose capture and captivity in England is so well known, and 

 who wrote the " King's Quhair " (or book), in honour of the lady 

 of whom he was enamoured ; William Dunbar, a poet of con- 

 siderable power ; Gawain Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, the first 

 translator of Virgil's "jEneid" into any English dialect, for 

 we may now venture to call his language English, though he 

 would have been but little pleased to hear it so called ; Robert 

 Henryson, or Henderson; a poet known among his contempo- 

 raries as Blind Harry, or Harry the Minstrel, author of a 

 narrative poem in honour of William Wallace ; and the accom- 

 plished knight, Sir David Lyndsay. It would be inconsistent 

 with the plan of these elementary lessons to go into any elabo- 

 rate examination of this early Scottish literature ; but it must 

 by no means bo overlooked by the student of English litera- 

 ture, and we have said enough to intimate its importance. 



With the accession of Henry VII. to the throne of England, 

 the second period into which we have divided the history of 

 English literature ends. Not that any great revival of literary 

 energy, or any great change in the condition of our literature, 

 is to be seen upon this event ; but England was at this time 

 brought under new influences which in the end produced great 

 results. So long as the country was wasted with civil war, or 



paralysed by universal distrust, any real progress in literature 

 or learning was impossible. But with the close of the dynastio 

 struggle the danger of civil war was at an end. Domestic 

 peace and the influence of a strong government brought with 

 them increasing wealth and prosperity. Men were at leisure 

 for the pursuits of peace, and England was in a condition to 

 take her place in the race of learning. In the fifteenth century 

 the decisive test by which advancement in learning was to be 

 measured was knowledge of the Greek language. Among many 

 Continental nations, and especially in Italy, the Greek language 

 and literature had been studied for the greater part of the 

 century. But now for the first time we find Greek regularly 

 taught, and a high degree of Greek scholarship attained in 

 England. And this in its turn, while it was partly caused by, 

 largely increased that close communication between English 

 and foreign scholars which was necessary in order to give to 

 England the full benefit of what had been achieved in other 

 countries. All these causes contributed to prepare the national 

 mind in England to receive its share of that great wave of intel- 

 lectual energy which was beginning to sweep over Europe, and 

 to render possible the literary glories of the sixteenth century. 



The reign of Henry VII. itself has little literary fruit to show. 

 Stephen Hawes was a poet once famous ; but his many poems, 

 of which the chief is an allegorical work, " The Pastime of 

 Pleasure," are now almost forgotten. A little later in date than 

 Hawes was another poet, Alexander Barclay, whose chief work 

 is a translation from the German of Sebastian Brandt's satire, 

 " The Ship of Fools." 



John Skelton belongs to the reign of Henry VII. and the 

 early part of the next. He was a Churchman by profession, 

 and his scholarship is spoken of by no less a scholar than 

 Erasmus in terms of the highest admiration. He was a volu- 

 minous writer, both in Latin and English. But what he best 

 deserves to be remembered for are his humorous and satiric 

 poems in English. The great butt of his satire was Cardinal 

 Wolsey. And no doubt the great popularity of these poems, 

 and probably, too, the impunity of their author, were due to the 

 universal unpopularity of the cardinal. To a modern taste, these 

 satires are wholly destitute of poetical power ; but they are not 

 without humour, though their chief characteristic, and no doubt 

 at the time their chief merit, was their exhaustless fertility of 

 abuse. The jingling metre in which Skelton wrote, and the 

 plainness of his abuse, may be well understood from a single 

 specimen of a very few lines. The contrast between Wolsey'a 

 pride and his low birth are delicately alluded to as follows : 



But this mad Amalek, 

 Like to a Mameluke, 

 He regardeth lords 

 No more the potshords ; 

 He is in such elation 

 Of his exaltation, 

 And the supportatiou 

 Of our sovereign lord, 

 That, God to record, 



He ruleth all at will 

 Without reason or sldll ; 

 Howbeit the primordial 

 Of his wretched original, 

 And his base progeny, 

 And his greasy genealogy, 

 He came of the sang royal 

 That was cast out of a 

 butcher's stall. 



In the reign of Henry VIII., we need hardly remind our 

 readers, the Reformation was in progress. The great religious 

 struggle was convulsing Europe, and England not less than 

 other countries. The intellectual atmosphere was essentially 

 religious and controversial, and the literature of the day is in 

 the main of a corresponding character. Theological treatises, 

 sermons, serious, didactic, and philosophic writing, form its 

 staple. 



One consequence of this character in the literature of the 

 period deserves the careful attention of every student. It is an 

 invariable law in the history of literature that the weapon is not 

 forged till it is needed. No form of literary composition comes 

 into existence till the time has come when men's thoughts 

 require that form for their due expression. Up to the time at 

 which we are speaking, any literature in English having any- 

 thing artistic about it had been the literature of pleasure, and 

 its form, therefore, was naturally almost exclusively poetical. 

 There had, no doubt, been controversies enough carried on in 

 England, as that between nominalists and realists, and others 

 upon like questions of philosophy. But, except for a short time 

 in the days of Wickliffe, controversy and speculation had till now 

 been amongst philosophers, and on subjects which concerned 

 them alone. They had, therefore, naturally been carried on in 

 Latin, the language of the learned. But the questions now at 



