with more gravity than suits sportive subjects; we sometimes feel the tediousness of the good sense of the Priest of St. Mary Ottery. The edition of 1570 of the "Ship of Fooles"* contains other productions of Barclay. In his "Eclogues," ður good priest, who did not write, as he says, "for the laud of man," indulged his ethical and theological vein in pastoral poetry; and the interlocutors are citizens disputing with men of the country, and poets with their patrons. To have converted shepherds into scholastic disputants or town-satirists was an unnatural change; but this whimsical taste had been introduced by Petrarch and Mantuan; and the first eclogues in the English language, which Warton tells us are those of Barclay, took this strange form-an incongruity our Spenser had not the skill to avoid, and for which Milton has been censured. The less fortunate anomalies of genius are often perpetuated by the inconsiderate imitation of those who should be most sensible of their deformity. In the eclogues of Barclay, the country is ever represented in an impoverished, depressed state; and the splendour of the city, and the luxurious indulgence of the citizen and the courtier, offer a singular contrast to the extreme misery of the agriculturist. We may infer that the country had been deplorably ravaged or neglected in the civil wars, which, half a century afterwards, was to be covered by the fat beeves of the graziers of Elizabeth. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF Ir the art of biography be the development of "the ruling passion," it is in strong characters that we must seek for the feature. Learned and meditative as was Sir THOMAS MORE, a jesting humour, a philosophical jocundity, indulged on im * The wood-cuts in this edition are wretched; though in part they are copied from the fine specimens of the art which embellish the Latin version of Locherus. portant as well as on ordinary occasions, served his wise. purpose. He seems to have taken refuge from the follies of other men by retreating to the pleasantry of his own. Grave men censured him for the absence of all gravity; and some imagined that the singularity of his facetious disposition, which sometimes seemed even ludicrous, was carried on to affectation. It was certainly inherent--it was a constitutional temper-it twined itself in his fibres-it betrayed itself on his countenance, We detect it from the comic vein of his boyhood when among the players; we pursue it through the numerous transactions of his life; and we leave him at its last solemn close, when life and death were within a second of each other, uttering three jests upon the scaffold. Even when he seemed to have quitted the world, and had laid his head on the block, he bade the executioner stay his hand till he had removed his beard, observing, "that that had never committed any treason." This mirthful mind had, indeed, settled on his features. ERASMUS, who has furnished us with an enamelled portrait of MORE, among its minuter touches reluctantly confessed that "the countenance of Sir Thomas More was a transcript of his mind, inclining to an habitual smile ;" and he adds, “ingenuously to confess the truth, that face is formed for the expression of mirth rather than of gravity or dignity." But, lest he should derange the gravity of the German to whom he was writing, Erasmus cautiously qualifies the disparaging delineation-"though as far as possible removed from folly or buffoonery." MORE, however, would assume a solemn countenance when on the point of throwing out some facetious stroke. He has so described himself when an interlocutor in one of his dialogues addresses him-"You use to look so sadly when you mean merrily, that many times men doubt whether you speak in sport when you mean good earnest."* The unaffected playfulness of the mind; the smile whose sweetness allayed the causticity of the tongue; the tingling pleasantry when pointed at persons; the pungent raillery which corrected opinions without scorn or contumely; and the art of promptly amusing the mind of another by stealing it away from a present object-appeared not only in his conversations, but was carried into his writings. * Sir Thomas More's Workes, 127. volume on folly, which we still open; Brandt furnishes a massive tome, with fools huddled together; and while we lose our own, we are astonished at his patience, The severity of this decision, we own, is that of a critic of the nineteenth century on an author of the sixteenth, It is amusing to observe the perplexities of an eminent French critic, Monsieur Guizot, in his endeavour to decide on the "Stultifera Navis." A critic of his school could not rightly comprehend how it happened that so dull a book had been a popular one, multiplied by editions in all the languages of Europe. "It is," says M. Guizot, "a collection of extravagant or of gross plaisanteries—which may have been poignant at their time, but which at this day have no other merit than that of having had great success three hundred years ago." The salt of plaisanteries cannot be damped by three centuries, provided they were such; but our author is by no means facetious: he is much too downright; the tone is invariably condemnatory or exhortative; and the Proverbs, the Psalms, and Jeremiah, are more frequently appealed to than Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, who occasionally show their heads in his margin. We must look somewhat deeper would we learn why a book which now tries our patience was not undeserving of those multiplied editions which have ascertained its popularity. At the period when this volume appeared, we in the north were far removed from the urbanity and the elevated ethics of lettered Italy. Brandt took this general view of society at the time when the illustrious Castiglione was an ambassador to our Henry the Seventh, and was meditating to model the manners of his countrymen by his Libro dell' Cortigiana; and La Casa, by his Galateo, was founding a code of minute politeness. But neither France, nor Germany, nor England, had yet greatly advanced in the civil intercourse of life, and could not appreciate such exility of elegance, and such sublimated refinement. With us, the staple of our moral philosophy was of a homespun but firm texture, and had in it more of yarn than of silk. Men had little to read; they were not weary of that eternal iteration of admonition on whatever was most painful or most despicable in their conduct; their ideas were uncertain, and their minds remained to be developed; nothing was trite or trivial. In his wide survey of human life, the author addressed the mundane fools of his age in the manner level to their comprehension; the ethical character of the volume was such, that the Abbot Trithemus designated it as a divine book; and in this volume, which read like a homily, while every man beheld the reflection of his own habits and thoughts, he chuckled over the sayings and doings of his neighbours. If any one quipped the profession of another, the sufferer had only to turn the leaf to find ample revenge; and these were the causes of the uninterrupted popularity of this ethical work. "The Ship of Fools" is, indeed, cumbrous, rude, and inartificial, and was not constructed on the principles which regulate our fast-sailing vessels; yet it may be prized for something more than its curiosity. It is an ancient satire, of that age of simplicity which must precede an age of refinement. If man in society changes his manners, he cannot vary his species; man remains nothing but man; for, however disguised by new modes of acting, the same principles of our actions are always at work. The same follies and the same vices in their result actuate the human being in all ages; and he who turns over the volume of the learned civilian of Germany will find detailed those great moral effects in life which, if the modern moralist may invest with more dignity, he could not have discovered with more truth. We have outgrown his counsels, but we never shall elude the vexatious consequences of his experience; and many a chapter in the "Ship of Fools" will point many an argument ad hominum, and awaken in the secret hours of our reminiscences the pang of contrite sorrows, or tingle our cheek with a blush for our weaknesses. The truths of human nature are ever echoing in our breasts. "The Ship of Fools," by Alexander Barclay-a volume of renown among literary antiquaries, and of rarity and price is at once a translation and an original. In octave stanza, flowing in the ballad measure, Barclay has a natural construction of style still retaining a vernacular vigour. He is noticed by Warton for having contributed his share in the improvement of English phraseology; and, indeed, we are often surprised to discover many felicities of our native idiom; and the work, though it should be repulsive to some for its black-letter, is perfectly intelligible to a modern reader. The verse being prosaic, preserves its colloquial ease, though with more gravity than suits sportive subjects; we sometimes feel the tediousness of the good sense of the Priest of St. Mary Ottery. The edition of 1570 of the "Ship of Fooles"* contains other productions of Barclay. In his "Eclogues," our good priest, who did not write, as he says, " for the laud of man,” indulged his ethical and theological vein in pastoral poetry; and the interlocutors are citizens disputing with men of the country, and poets with their patrons. To have converted shepherds into scholastic disputants or town-satirists was an unnatural change; but this whimsical taste had been introduced by Petrarch and Mantuan ; and the first eclogues in the English language, which Warton tells us are those of Barclay, took this strange form-an incongruity our Spenser had not the skill to avoid, and for which Milton has been censured. The less fortunate anomalies of genius are often perpetuated by the inconsiderate imitation of those who should be most sensible of their deformity. In the eclogues of Barclay, the country is ever represented in an impoverished, depressed state; and the splendour of the city, and the luxurious indulgence of the citizen and the courtier, offer a singular contrast to the extreme misery of the agriculturist. We may infer that the country had been deplorably ravaged or neglected in the civil wars, which, half a century afterwards, was to be covered by the fat beeves of the graziers of Elizabeth. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF If the art of biography be the development of "the ruling passion," it is in strong characters that we must seek for the feature. Learned and meditative as was Sir THOMAS MORE, a jesting humour, a philosophical jocundity, indulged on im * The wood-cuts in this edition are wretched; though in part they are copied from the fine specimens of the art which embellish the Latin version of Locherus, |