Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/349

 12 s. VIIL APRIL 9, i92i.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 283- From the time he left Oxford in 1524 whither he had gone to Corpus Christ i College as a scholar from Winchester Udall seems to have been engaged in teaching, and from his learning and classical attainments soon became extensively known, so that ten years later he was appointed " Magister Informator," or head master, of Eton College. Dismissed from Eton in 1541 for reasons which it is not necessary here to enter into he continued to be engaged for some time, in conjunction with the Princess Mary, as I have said, in trans- lating Erasnms's 'Paraphrase upon the New Testament ' into English, which was printed in black letter in two volumes in 1548 by Edward Whitchurch ; of the first volume of which in the original embossed leathered-covered binding, with leather and metal clasps, and containing the books of the four Evangelists and the Acts of the Apostles, I am again the fortunate pos- sessor, though, sad to say, it is lacking in the last chapter of the Acts. It is clear that Udall must have retained considerable influence at Court, for he was appointed in succession Vicar of Braintree, Prebend of Windsor, Rector of Calthorn, and in 1555, head master of Westminster School which he held until a month or two before his death at the end of the following year. With his character or ability as a school- master we are not here so much concerned. But if the popular saying that " the best master is the best beater ' ' is true, then from what Thomas Tusser says of him, derived from his own personal experiences as an Eton scholar, we must conclude that it stood very high, second only perhaps in this respect to his famous successor at West- minster, Dr. Busby. As to Udall's personal appearance there would seem to be no evidence no portrait extant. What authority, then, is there for the portrait, contemptible both physically and morally, drawn of the man therein described as " Magister Nicholas Udal," in those three very interesting volumes relating to the Tudor period by Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer 'The Fifth Queen,' 'The Privy Seal ' and ' The Fifth Queen Crowned ' which are surely intended to be more than mere works of fiction ? The Saturday Review of July 11, 1908, in reviewing the last of these books, remarks : " The author is not careful to follow exactly 11i<> record of events as related in creditable histories," and asks : " on what grounds he makes Nicholas Udall play so important a part at Court and in the life of K a therine Howard, when, according to history, he - was at Oxford, and then at Eton till 1541, and,- later, Vicar of Braintree ? " To that question no answer has yet been - returned. May we not take it then that the portrait as drawn by Mr. Hueffer is wholly imaginative and incorrect, and that the work upon which Udall was engaged in Court circles was confined to what has been already stated, namely, the assistance he was rendering the Princess Mary in her religious or ecclesiastical studies, and later,, perhaps, to the preparation and supervision of stage-plays for the Court ? Whilst it is impossible in the limited space of this article to make any observa- tions upon the way in which the play has been presented to us, some slight comment may, perhaps, be allowed upon one of the outstanding features of the plot which formed the " ambiguitie " which led, as we- have seen, to the discovery of the author as illustrating the antiquity of this style of '. versification, a kind of nonsense verse,, which, by a change in punctuation, causes a different or an exactly opposite impression of its contents to be drawn. This is, of course Ralph's famous letter to Dame Custance, already alluded to as occurring in Act III. sc. iv., which Merygreeke- wrongly and purposely misread, and upon which the rightful interpretation was sub- sequently placed by the Scrivener (sc. v.).- This I have already pointed out in ' N. &Q .' (10 S. ii. 183), where I set out the letter in full in its misleading form, and suggested that this was, so far as I was aware, the earliest instance of this style of versification. A later instance has, however, been given by Miss Alice Law in an article in The Fortnightly Review for September, 1889, in which she contributes a verse of ten lines taken from an old MS. commonplace book,. temp. 1667, which Miss Law describes as " a nonsense verse of extraordinary charm." This is, to the best of my recollection, very similar to the one of which I gave an illus- tration in The Folk-Lore Journal in 1889 (vii. 261) in a lengthy article on 'Dorset- shire Children's Games,' commencing : I saw a fish-pond all on fire ; I saw a house bow to a squire ; I saw a parson twelve feet high ; I saw a cottage near the sky ; &c. and in which by an alteration in the punc- tuation, the whole sense is changed and the jingle becomes at once intelligible.