Of John Heywood, the favorite jester of Henry the Eighth and his daughter Mary, and the intimate of Sir Thomas More, whose congenial humor may have mingled with his own, more table-talk and promptness at reply have been handed down to us than of any writer of the times. His quips, and quirks, and quibbles, are of his age, but his copious pleasantry still enlivens; these smoothed the brow of Henry, and relaxed the rigid muscles of the melancholy Mary. He had the entrée at all times to the privy-chamber, and often to administer a strong dose of himself, which her majesty's physicians would prescribe. He is distinguished as Heywood the epigrammatist; a title fairly won by the man who has left six centuries of epigrams, collected and adjusted as many English proverbs in his verse, beside the quaint conceits of " crossing of proverbs."* Of these six hundred epigrams it is possible not a single one is epigrammatic: we have never had a Martial. Even when it became a fashion to write books of epigrams half a century subsequently, they usually closed in a miserable quibble, a dull apothegm, or at the best, like those of Sir John Harrington, in a plain story rhymed. Wit, in our sense of the term, was long unpractised, and the modern epigram was not yet discovered.

Heywood, who had flourished under Henry, on the change in the reign of Edward, clung to the ancient customs. He was a Romanist, but had he not recovered in some degree from the cecity of superstition, he had not so keenly exposed, as he has done, some vulgar impostures. It happened, however, that some unlucky jest, trenching on treason, flew from the lips of the unguarded jester; it would have hanged some- - but pleasant verses promptly addressed to the young sovereign saved him at the pinchhowever he gathered from "the council" that this was no jesting-time, and he left the country in the day that Bale

* That is, proverbs with humorous answers to them. See the Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue, by Mr. Payne Collier, of Lord Francis Egerton's Library of Early English Literature, p. 2.

was returning from his emigration under King Henry. On Mary's accession, Bale again retired, and Heywood suddenly appeared at court. Asked by the queen "What wind blew him there ?". "Two specially; the one to see her majesty!" he replied. "We thank you for that," said the queen, "but I pray you what is the other?"-" That your grace might see me!" There was shrewdness in this pleasantry, to bespeak the favor of his royal patroness. Four short years did not elapse ere Elizabeth opened her long reign, and then the merry Romanist for ever bid farewell to his native land, while Bale finally sat beside his English hearth. These were very moveable and removeable times, and no one was certain how long he should remain in his new locality.

The genius of Heywood created "The Merrie Interlude;" unlike Bale, as in all things, he never opened the Bible for a stage-play, but approaching comedy, he became the painter of manners, and the chronicler of domestic life. Warton certainly has hastily and contradictorily censured Heywood, without a right comprehension of his peculiar subjects; yet he admired at least one of Heywood's writings, in which, being anonymous, he did not recognise the victim of his vague statements. Warton and his followers have obscured a true genius for exuberant humor, keen irony, and exquisite ridicule, such as Rabelais and Swift would not have disdained, and have not always surpassed. One of his interludes is accessible for those who can revel in a novel scene of comic invention. This interlude is "The Four P's; the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary, and the Pedler." Each flouts the other, and thus display their professional knaveries.*

The ludicrous strokes of this piece could never have come from a bigot to the ancient superstition, however attached to the ancient creed. We cannot tell how far the jester may have been influenced by a proclamation of 28th of Henry the Eighth, to protect "the poor innocent people Dodsley's "Old Plavs," vol. i.

from those light persons called pardoners by color of their indulgences, &c." He has curiously exhibited to us all the trumpery regalia of papistry; as he also exposed "The Friery" in another interlude which has all the appearance of a merry tale from Boccaccio.

66

So plays the jocund spirit of Heywood the Jester, in his minstrel verse and pristine idiom; but we have now to tell another tale. Heywood is the author of a ponderous volume, and an interminable "parable” of the “ Spider and the Fly." It is said to have occupied the thoughts of the writer during twenty years. This unlucky "heir of his invention" is dressed out with a profusion of a hundred wood-cuts, then rare and precious things, among which starts up the full length of the author more than once. Warton impatiently never reached the conclusion, where the author has confided to us the secret of his incomprehensible intention. There Warton would have found that we must understand that the spiders represent the protestants and the flies the catholics; that the maid with the broom sweeping away the cobwebs (to the annoyance of their weavers) is Mary armed with the civil power, executing the commands of her master (Christ), and her mistress (Mother Church)." We see at once all the embarrassments and barrenness of this wearying and perplexed fancy. Warton contents himself with what he calls "a sensible criticism," taken from Harrison, a protestant minister, and one of the partners of Holinshed's Chronicle; it is as mordacious as a periodical criticism. "Neither he who made this book, nor any who reads it, can reach unto the meaning." Warton, to confirm "the sensible criticism," alleges as a proof of its unpopularity that it was never reprinted; but it was published in 1556, and Mary died in 1558. A vindication of " the maid with the broom" might be equally unwelcome to "spiders and flies.”

How it happened that the court-jester who has sent forth such volumes of mirth could have kept for years hammering at a dull and dense poem, is a literary problem

which perhaps admits of a solution. We may ascribe this aberration of genius to the author's position in society. Heywood was a Romanist from principle; that he was no bigot, his free satires on vulgar superstitions attest. But the jester at times was a thoughtful philosopher. One of his interludes is "The Play of the Weather," where the ways of Providence are vindicated in the distribution of the seasons. But "mad, merry Heywood" was the companion of many friends papists and protestants at

court and in all the world over. His creed was almost whole in broken times, perhaps agreeing a little with the protestant, and then reverting to the Romanist. In this unbalanced condition, mingling the burlesque with the solemn, unwilling to excommunicate his friend the protestant "spider," and intent to vindicate the Romanist "fly," often he laid aside and often resumed his confused emotions. It might require dates to settle the precise allusions; what he wrote under Henry and Edward would be of another color than under the Marian rule. His gayety and his gravity offuscate one another, and the readers of the longsome fiction, or his dark parallel, were puzzled even among his contemporaries, to know in what sense to receive them. Sympathizing with "the fly," and not uncourteous to "the spider," our author has shown the danger of combining the burlesque with the serious; and thus it happened that the most facetious genius could occupy twenty years in compounding, by fits and starts, a dull poem which neither party pretended rightly to understand.

395

ROGER ASCHAM.

Ir would, perhaps, have surprised Roger Ascham, the scholar of a learned age, and a Greek professor, that the history of English literature might open with his name; for in his English writings he had formed no premeditated word, designed for posterity as well as his own times. The subjects he has written on were solely suggested by the occasion, and incurred the slight of the cavaliers of his day, who had not yet learned that humble titles may conceal performances which exceed their promise, and that trifles cease to be trivial in the workmanship of genius.

An apology for a favorite recreation, that of archery, for his indulgence in which his enemies, and sometimes his friends reproached the truant of academic Greek; on account of the affairs of Germany while employed as secretary to the English embassy; and the posthumous treatise of "The Schoolmaster," originating in an accidental conversation at table, constitute the whole of the claims of Ascham to the rank of an English classic a degree much higher than was attained to by the learning of Sir Thomas Elyot, and the genius of Sir Thomas More.

The mind of Ascham was stored with all the wealth of ancient literature the nation possessed. Ascham was proud, when alluding to his master the learned Cheke, and to his royal pupil Queen Elizabeth, of having been the pupil of the greatest scholar, and the preceptor to the greatest pupil in England; but we have rather to admire the intrepidity of his genius, which induced him to avow the noble design of setting an example of composing in our vernacular idiom. He tells us in his Toxophilus, "I write this English matter in the English language for Englishmen."

He introduced an easy and natural style in En