The Ship of Fools, Volume 1-2, Sebastian Brant [good books to read TXT] 📗

honours assigned him by Wadding (Scriptores Ordinis Minorum,

1806, p. 5), who promotes him to be Suffragan Bishop of Bath and Wells, and

Bale, who, in a slanderous anecdote, the locale of which is also Wells,

speaks of him as a chaplain of Queen Mary’s, though Mary did not ascend the

throne till the year after his death. As these statements are nowhere

confirmed, it is not improbable that their authors have fallen into error

by confounding the poet Barclay, with a Gilbert Berkeley, who became Bishop

of Bath and Wells in 1559. One more undoubted, but tardy, piece of

preferment was awarded him which may be regarded as an honour of some

significance. On the 30th April 1552, the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury,

London, presented him to the Rectory of All Hallows, Lombard Street, but

the well-deserved promotion came too late to be enjoyed. A few weeks after,

and before the 10th June, at which date his will was proved, he died, as

his biographers say, “at a very advanced age;” at the good old age of

seventy-six, as shall be shown presently, at Croydon where he had passed

his youth, and there in the Church he was buried. “June 10th 1552,

Alexander Barkley sepult,” (Extract from the Parish Register, in Lyson’s

Environs of London).

 

A copy of his will, an extremely interesting and instructive document, has

been obtained from Doctors’ Commons, and will be found appended. It bears

in all its details those traits of character which, from all that we

otherwise know, we are led to associate with him. In it we see the earnest,

conscientious minister whose first thought is of the poor, the loyal

churchman liberal in his support of the house of God, the kind relative in

his numerous and considerate bequests to his kith and kin, the amiable,

much loved man in the gifts of remembrance to his many friends, and the

pious Christian in his wishes for the prayers of his survivors “to

Almightie God for remission of my synnes, and mercy upon my soule.”

 

Barclay’s career and character, both as a churchman and a man of letters,

deserve attention and respect from every student of our early history and

literature. In the former capacity he showed himself diligent, honest, and

anxious, at a time when these qualities seemed to have been so entirely

lost to the church as to form only a subject for clerical ridicule. In the

latter, the same qualities are also prominent, diligence, honesty, bold

outspokenness, an ardent desire for the pure, the true, and the natural,

and an undisguised enmity to everything false, self-seeking, and vile.

Everything he did was done in a pure way, and to a worthy end.

 

Bale stands alone in casting aspersions upon his moral character,

asserting, as Ritson puts it, “in his bigoted and foul-mouthed way,” that

“he continued a hater of truth, and under the disguise of celibacy a filthy

adulterer to the last;” and in his Declaration of Bonner’s articles (1561,

fol. 81), he condescends to an instance to the effect that “Doctoure

Barkleye hadde greate harme ones of suche a visitacion, at Wellys, before

he was Quene Maryes Chaplayne. For the woman whome he so religiouslye

visited did light him of all that he had, sauinge his workinge tolas. For

the whiche acte he had her in prison, and yet coulde nothing recouer

againe.” Whether this story be true of any one is perhaps doubtful, and, if

true of a Barclay, we are convinced that he is not our author. It may have

arisen as we have seen from a mistake as to identity. But apart from the

question of identity, we have nothing in support of the slander but Bale’s

“foul-mouthed” assertion, while against it we have the whole tenor and aim

of Barclay’s published writings. Everywhere he inculcates the highest and

purest morality, and where even for that purpose he might be led into

descriptions of vice, his disgust carries him past what most others would

have felt themselves justified in dealing with. For example, in the chapter

of “Disgysyd folys” he expressly passes over as lightly as possible what

might to others have proved a tempting subject:

 

“They disceyue myndes chaste and innocent

With dyuers wayes whiche I wyll nat expres

Lyst that whyle I labour this cursyd gyse to stynt

I myght to them mynyster example of lewdnes

And therfore in this part I shall say les

Than doth my actour.”

 

Elsewhere he declares:

 

“for my boke certaynly

I haue compyled: for vertue and goodnes

And to reuyle foule synne and vyciousnes”

 

But citation is needless; there is not a page of his writings which will

not supply similar evidence, and our great early moralist may, we think, be

dismissed from Court without a stain on his character.

 

Indeed to his high pitched morality, he doubtless owed in some degree the

great and extended popularity of his poetical writings in former times and

their neglect in later. Sermons and “good” books were not yet in the

sixteenth century an extensive branch of literature, and “good” people

could without remorse of conscience vary their limited theological reading

by frowning over the improprieties and sins of their neighbours as depicted

in the “Ship,” and joining, with a serious headshaking heartiness, in the

admonitions of the translator to amendment, or they might feel

“strengthened” by a glance into the “Mirrour of good Maners,” or edified by

hearing of the “Miseryes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in

generall,” as told in the “Eclogues.”

 

Certain it is that these writings owed little of their acceptance to

touches of humour or satire, to the gifts of a poetical imagination, or the

grace of a polished diction. The indignation of the honest man and the

earnestness of the moralist waited not for gifts and graces. Everything

went down, hard, rough, even uncouth as it stood, of course gaining in

truth and in graphic power what it wants in elegance. Still, with no

refinement, polish or elaboration, there are many picturesque passages

scattered throughout these works which no amount of polishing could have

improved. How could a man in a rage be better touched off than thus (“Ship”

I. 182, 15).

 

“This man malycious whiche troubled is with wrath

Nought els soundeth but the hoorse letter R.”

 

The passion of love is so graphically described that it is difficult to

imagine our priestly moralist a total stranger to its power, (I. 81).

 

“For he that loueth is voyde of all reason

Wandrynge in the worlde without lawe or mesure

In thought and fere sore vexed eche season

And greuous dolours in loue he must endure

No creature hym selfe, may well assure

From loues soft dartis: I say none on the grounde

But mad and folysshe bydes he whiche hath the wounde

 

Aye rennynge as franatyke no reason in his mynde

He hath no constaunce nor ease within his herte

His iyen ar blynde, his wyll alwaye inclyned

To louys preceptes yet can nat he departe

The Net is stronge, the sole caught can nat starte

The darte is sharpe, who euer is in the chayne

Can nat his sorowe in vysage hyde nor fayne”

 

For expressive, happy simile, the two following examples are capital:—

 

“Yet sometimes riches is geuen by some chance

To such as of good haue greatest aboundaunce.

Likewise as streames unto the sea do glide.

But on bare hills no water will abide.

… …

So smallest persons haue small rewarde alway

But men of worship set in authoritie

Must haue rewardes great after their degree.”—ECLOGUE I.

 

“And so such thinges which princes to thee geue

To thee be as sure as water in a siue

… … .

So princes are wont with riches some to fede

As we do our swine when we of larde haue nede

We fede our hogges them after to deuour

When they be fatted by costes and labour.”—ECLOGUE I.

 

The everlasting conceit of musical humanity is very truthfully hit off.

 

“This is of singers the very propertie

Alway they coueyt desired for to be

And when their frendes would heare of their cunning

Then are they neuer disposed for to sing,

But if they begin desired of no man

Then shewe they all and more then they can

And neuer leaue they till men of them be wery,

So in their conceyt their cunning they set by.”—ECLOGUE II.

 

Pithy sayings are numerous. Comparing citizens with countrymen, the

countryman says:—

 

“Fortune to them is like a mother dere

As a stepmother she doth to us appeare.”

 

Of money:

 

“Coyne more than cunning exalteth every man.”

 

Of clothing:

 

“It is not clothing can make a man be good

Better is in ragges pure liuing innocent

Than a soule defiled in sumptuous garment.”

 

It is as the graphic delineator of the life and condition of the country in

his period that the chief interest of Barclay’s writings, and especially of

the “Ship of Fools,” now lies. Nowhere so accessibly, so fully, and so

truthfully will be found the state of Henry the Eighth’s England set forth.

Every line bears the character of truthfulness, written as it evidently is,

in all the soberness of sadness, by one who had no occasion to exaggerate,

whose only object and desire was, by massing together and describing

faithfully the follies and abuses which were evident to all, to shame every

class into some degree of moral reformation, and, in particular, to effect

some amelioration of circumstances to the suffering poor.

 

And a sad picture it is which we thus obtain of merrie England in the good

old times of bluff King Hal, wanting altogether in the couleur de rose

with which it is tinted by its latest historian Mr Froude, who is ably

taken to task on this subject by a recent writer in the Westminster Review,

whose conclusions, formed upon other evidence than Barclay’s, express so

fairly the impression left by a perusal of the “Ship of Fools,” and the

Eclogues, that we quote them here. “Mr Froude remarks: ‘Looking therefore,

at the state of England as a whole, I cannot doubt that under Henry the

body of the people were prosperous, well-fed, loyal, and contented. In all

points of material comfort, they were as well off as ever they had been

before; better off than they have ever been in later times.’ In this

estimate we cannot agree. Rather we should say that during, and for long

after, this reign, the people were in the most deplorable condition of

poverty and misery of every kind. That they were ill-fed, that loyalty was

at its lowest ebb, that discontent was rife throughout the land. ‘In all

points of material comfort,’ we think they were worse off than they had

ever been before, and infinitely worse off than they have ever been since

the close of the sixteenth century,—a century in which the cup of

England’s woes was surely fuller than it has ever been since, or will, we

trust, ever be again. It was the century in which this country and its

people passed through a baptism of blood as well as ‘a baptism of fire,’

and out of which they came holier and better. The epitaph which should be

inscribed over the century is contained in a sentence written by the famous

Acham in 1547:—‘Nam vita, quæ nunc vivitur a plurimis, non vita sed

miseria est.’” So, Bradford (Sermon on Repentance, 1533) sums up

contemporary opinion in a single weighty sentence: “All men may see if they

will that the whoredom pride, unmercifulness, and tyranny of England far

surpasses any age that ever was before.” Every page of Barclay corroborates

these accounts of tyranny, injustice, immorality, wretchedness, poverty,

and general discontent.

 

Not only in fact and