Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 52.djvu/341

 abbot John Islip, an old acquaintance, gave him a kindly reception, but he did not venture again to forego his friendly protection. He lamented his misfortunes in a whimsical ballad (first printed from MS. belonging to William Bragge, esq., of Sheffield (formerly Heber's), in Athenæum, November 1873). He died at Westminster on 21 June 1529, four months before the fall of his formidable enemy. He was buried in the chancel of St. Margaret's Church, and on his grave were inscribed the words ‘Johannes Skeltonus, vates Pierius, hic situs est.’

Skelton's alleged propensity to practical joking made him the hero of numerous farcical anecdotes, many of them plainly apocryphal. Some were collected in a little volume, which became very popular, under the title ‘Merie Tales Newly Imprinted and made by Master Skelton, Poet Laureat’ (London, Thomas Colwell, 12mo, n.d. [1566]; cf. Stationers' Registers, 1557–70, ed. Collier, i. 160). It is reprinted by Dyce and in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's ‘Old Jest-Books.’ Stories of Skelton also figure in the collections entitled ‘A C. Mery Talys’ and ‘Tales and Quicke Answeres.’ The popularity which Skelton's ‘Merie Tales,’ and a similar collection dealing with the adventures of John Scogan, acquired in the sixteenth century led to the frequent association of Skelton and Scogan in popular speech and literature as types of clownish wags [see under ]. Gabriel Harvey asserted that ‘Sir Skelton and Master Scoggin were innocents’ compared with his insolent foe Tom Nash. Scogan and Skelton were the leading characters in a lost play, called after them, by Richard Hathaway and William Rankins, and Ben Jonson introduced both into his ‘Masque of the Fortunate Isles’ (performed 3 Jan. 1624–5). A somewhat more serious view of Skelton's position led Anthony Munday to portray him as Chorus in his ‘Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon’ (1599). Sixteenth-century critics, owing doubtless in some degree to his traditional reputation, treated Skelton as a ‘rude, rayling rimer’ (, Arte, ii. cap. ix.) or a scurrilous buffoon (, Palladis Tamia). William Bullein, in his ‘Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence’ (1573), describes his frowning and frost-bitten face and his ‘hot burning choler kindled against the cankered cardinal, Wolsey.’ Drayton, in the preface to his ‘Eclogues,’ ineptly characterised as ‘pretty’ Skelton's ‘Colyn Cloute,’ which he absurdly ascribed to Scogan. Subsequently Edward Phillipps wrote of his ‘loose, rambling style,’ and Pope applied to him the epithets ‘beastly,’ ‘low,’ and ‘bad.’ But he deserves no such severe censure. His own estimate of himself is juster— Though my rime be ragged, Tatter'd and jagged, … It hath in it some pith. Skelton's untrammelled vigour and his frequent recourse to French and Latin phrases, as well as to the vernacular dialect of East Anglia, left their impress on the English language and increased its flexibility. His characteristic metre—usually called after his name—consists of lines varying in number of syllables from four to six, and rhyming now by couplets and now four, five, or more times over. It is not improbable that Skelton invented the precise form of his favourite metre; but verse embodying its leading features was produced by French and Low-Latin writers before his time (cf. the fabliau ‘Piramus et Tisbé’ in et, Fabliaux, iv. 337–8). That Skelton was acquainted with French literature is proved by his translation of Deguilleville's ‘Pelerinage de la Vie humaine’ and by his frequent interpolation of French words and phrases to meet the exigencies of his exacting scheme of rhymes. ‘Skeltonian’ metre often sinks to voluble doggerel, and gives no room for poetic graces, but it is thoroughly well adapted to furious invective and to burlesque narration. In his attacks on Wolsey and the clergy Skelton is ‘like a wild beast,’ tearing language ‘as with teeth and paws, ravenously, savagely’ (cf., Book of the Poets, 1864, pp. 126–7). Elsewhere, as in ‘Phylyp Sparowe,’ which Coleridge described as ‘exquisite and original,’ or in the ‘Tunnynge,’ his grotesque volubility anticipates the fuller-bodied and more coherent humour of Rabelais. But ‘Skeltonian’ metre was not destined for a permanent place in English literature. Disciples of Skelton clumsily imitated it as well as his vein of satire in such denunciations of the clergy as ‘Vox Populi Vox Dei’ and ‘The Image of Ypocrisy’ (cf., ii. 400–47; , Ballads from MSS. pp. 108–51, 167–274). One of the latest practisers of the metre was the author of a poem describing the defeat of the Spanish armada, entitled ‘A Skeltonicall Salutation’ (1589).

At the same time Skelton had command of many of the more conventional metres. Ballads like that on ‘Mistress Margery Hussey’ show a power of adapting simple words to lyric purposes; while his occasional displays of genuine poetic feeling in the poems (chiefly in Chaucerian stanza) involving allegorical machinery influenced many later poets of his own century. Sackville's ‘Induction’ to the