Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/33

Rh have shrunk from any attempt to deface the unity of that marvellous organization which had assumed an indefeasible dominion over the consciences of men. They thought to purify the stream, and blinked the fact that the fountainhead was poisoned. The struggles of such men awake a painful interest. Enslaved to a system they reverenced as a whole, yet despised in detail; their inner belief jarring with that outer creed which education and custom had fastened round their minds; they inculcate alike a lesson and a warning. The chain that shackled them has been broken, and the thraldom shattered. A spurious liberality would again facilitate the imposition of the exploded delusion.

Skelton was descended from a family anciently settled in Cumberland. He himself was probably born in Norfolk soon after the middle of the fifteenth century. He studied at Cambridge, at Oxford and at Louvaine. At Oxford he was laureated, and obtained the privilege to wear a particular robe. In a satirical poem against his contemporary Garnythe, he says triumphantly:

The habit here referred to, and which by special favour he was allowed to wear at Cambridge, was a robe of white and green, as we gather from another of his diatribes against the same individual.

The word Calliope was worked upon it, in silk and gold as we learn from the following poem: