even Henry the Eighth could not always change at will his political position - the minister in power may find means to counteract even the absolute king. A great stir was made in Wolsey's parliament; it was even proposed that the works of Chaucer should be wholly suppressed. Some good-humored sprite rose in favor of the only poet in the nation, observing that all the world knew that Dan Chaucer had never written anything more than fables! The authority of Wolsey so far prevailed, that "The Pilgrim's Tale" was suppressed; and it seems that the haughty prelate would willingly have suppressed the editor in his own person. Thynne was an intimate acquaintance of Skelton, whose caustic rhymes of "Colin Clout" had been concocted at his country-house. Thynne, in this perilous adventure of publishing "The Pilgrim's Tale," was saved from the talons of the cardinal, for this monarch's royal word was at all times sacred with him.

A literary anecdote of this monarch has been recently disclosed, which at least attests his ardor for information. When Henry wanted time, if not patience, to read a new work, he put copies into the hands of two opposite characters, and from the reports of these rival reviewers, the king ventured to deduce his own results. This method of judg ing a work without meditating on it, was a new royal cut in the road of literature, to which we of late have been accustomed; but it seemed with Henry rather to have increased the vacillations of his opinions, than steadied the firmness of his decisions.

The court of Henry displayed a brilliant circle of literary noblemen, distinguished for their translations, and some by their songs and sonnets. Parker, Lord Morley, was a favorite for his numerous versions, some of which he dedicated to the king; the witty Wyat, who always sustained the anagram of his name, was a familiar companion; nor could Henry be insensible to the elegant effusions of Surrey, unless his political feelings indisposed his admiration. It was at the king's command that Lord Berners

translated the Chronicles of Froissart, and the volume is adorned by the royal arms. Sternhold, the memorable psalm-enditer, was a groom of the chamber, and a personal favorite of his master; and Henry appointed the illustrious Leland to search for and to preserve the antiquities of England, and invested him with the honorable title of "The King's Antiquary.”

Yet

Scholars too stood around the royal table, and the company at the palace excelled that of any academy, as Erasmus has told us. Learning patronised by a despot became a fashionable accomplishment, and the model for the court was in the royal family themselves. It is from this period that we may date that race of learned ladies which continued through the long reign of our maiden queen. before the accession of Henry the Eighth, half a century had not elapsed when female literature was at so low an ebb, that Sir Thomas More noticed as an extraordinary circumstance that Jane Shore could read and write. When Erasmus visited the English court, he curiously observed that "The course of human affairs was changed; the monks famed in time past for learning are become ignorant, and women love books." Erasmus had witnessed at the court of Henry the Eighth the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, both of whom held an epistolary correspondence in Latin; the daughter of Sir Anthony Cook, and Lady Jane Grey, versed in Greek; and the Queen Catherine Parr, his fervent admirer for his paraphrase of the four gospels. Erasmus had frequented the house of the Mores, which he describes as a perfect musarum domicilium. The venerable Nicholas Udall, a contemporary, has also left us a picture of that day. "It is now a common thing to see young virgins so nouzeld [nursed] and trained in the study of letters, that they willingly set all other vain pastimes at nought-reading and writing, and with most earnest study, both early and late." The pliable nobility of Henry the Eighth easily took the bend of the royal family, and among their daughters, doubtless, there were more learned women

than are chronicled in Ballard's Memoirs. Lady Jane Grey meditating on Plato was not so uncommon an incident as it appears to us, in the insulated anecdote. The learning of that day must not be held as the pedantry of a later, for it was laying the foundations of every knowledge in the soil of England.

The king's more elegant tastes diffused themselves among the finer arts at a time when they were yet strangers in this land; his father's travelled taste had received a tincture of these arts when abroad, in Henry the Eighth they burst into existence with a more robust aptitude. He eagerly invited foreign artists to his court; but the patronage of an English monarch was not yet appreciated by some of the finest geniuses of Italy; we lay yet too far out of their observation and sympathies; and it is recorded of one of the Italian artists, a fiery spirit, who had visited England, that he designated us as quelle bestie Inglesi. Raphael and Titian could not be lured from their studios and their blue skies; but, fortunately, a northern genius, whose name is as immortal as their own, was domiciliated by the liberal monarch, the friend of Erasmus and of More Hans Holbein.

Among the musicians of Henry we find French, Italians, and Germans; he was himself a musician, and composed several pieces which I believe are still retained in the service of the Royal Chapel.* He had a taste for the gorgeous or grotesque amusements of the continent, combining them with a display of the fine arts in their scenical effects. One memorable night of the Epiphany, the court was startled by a new glory, where the king and his companions appeared in a scene which the courtiers had never before witnessed. "It was a mask after the manner of Italy, a thing not seen afore in England," saith the chronicler of Henry's court-days. Once, to amaze a foreign embassy, and on a sudden to raise up a banqueting-house, the mon

* Sir John Hawkins' History of Music, vol. ii.

arch set to work the right magicians; an architect, and a poet, and his master of the revels, were months inventing and laboring. The regal banqueting-house was adorned by the arts of picture and music, of sculpture and architecture ; all was full of illusion and reality; the house itself was a pageant to exhibit a pageant. The magnificent prince was himself so pleased, that he anxiously stopped his visiters at the points of sight most favorable to catch the illusion of the perspective. A monarch of such fine tastes and gorgeous fancies would create the artists who are the true inventors.

283

BOOKS OF THE PEOPLE.

THE people of Europe, who had no other knowledge of languages than their own uncultivated dialects, seem to have possessed what, if we may so dignify it, we would call a figurative literature of their own. It is obvious that the people could not be ignorant of the important transactions in their own land; transactions in which their fathers had been the spectators or the actors, the sons would perpetuate by their traditions; the names of their heroes had not died with them in the battle-field. Nor would the villain's subjection to the feudal lord spoil the merriment of the land, nor dull the quip of natural facetiousness.

66

66

Before the people had national books they had national songs. Even at a period so obscure as the days of Charlemagne there were most ancient songs, in which the act and wars of the old kings were sung." These songs which, the Secretary of Charlemagne has informed us, were sedulously collected by the command of that great monarch are described by the Secretary, according to his classical taste, as barbara et antiquissima carmina; barbarous," because they were composed in the rude vernacular language; yet such was their lasting energy that they were, even in the eighth century, held to be "most ancient," so long had they dwelt in the minds of the people! The enlightened emperor had more largely comprehended their results in the vernacular idiom on the genius of the nation than had the more learned and diplomatic Secretary. It was an ingenious conjecture, that, possibly, even these ancient songs may in some shape have come down to us in the elder northern and Teutonic romances, and the Danish, the Swedish, the Scottish, and the English popular ballads. The kindling narrative, and the fiery exploits which entranced the imagination of Charlemagne, mutilated or dis