Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/44

30 an event similar to the one Catullus has immortalized, and has won from Coleridge the praise of being an exquisite and original poem. His most popular production, however, was "The Tunning of Elinor Rumming." This is a description of an old hostess, who kept an ale-house at Leatherhead in Surrey, with some of her customers; and for coarseness, and at the same time for broad humour, exceeds anything he ever wrote. An interlude called "Magnificence," and "The Garland of Laurel," conclude the list of the larger poems which have survived to our times. In style they are obsolete, and without a copious glossary difficult to be understood, but they are valuable as having once powerfully affected opinion, and interpreted human conviction. The man has passed away, and his works, from their nature, could only be transitory as their author; but the brief glimpse we have of him, the scholar and the buffoon, a priest with his married concubine, and bastardized children, mocking half in anger, half in jest, or it might be in the wantonness of sorrow, at the falsehoods by which he was surrounded, may justly awaken our sympathy, nor fail to suggest a moral.

Skelton being the wag par excellence of his time, his name, as more recently that of honest Joe Miller, was woefully abused; and all the stray jests that nobody would own, were freely fathered upon him. Soon after his death, a small volume appeared, and became popular, entitled "Merry Tales, newly Imprinted and made by Master Skelton, Poet-Laureate," "very pleasant for the recreation of the mind," The admirers of "Punch" may be entertained with a specimen of the drollery that could amuse a ruder age.

"Skelton was an Englishman, born as Scogan was, and he was educated and brought up at Oxford; and there