This is good stuff for
wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when
God's Bible was banished the court, and _Morte Arthure_ received into
the prince's chamber."
The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into
England by the translation of the _Romaunt of the Rose_, reached its
extremity in Stephen Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_, printed by
Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and
pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long
series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as
Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, finally won the love
of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose culture
was exclusively mediaeval. His contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the
old fashions with the new classical learning. In his _Bowge of Courte_
(Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his earlier pieces, he
used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But his later poems were
mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him
_Skeltonical_. This was a sort of glorified doggerel, in short, swift,
ragged lines, with occasional intermixture of French and Latin.
Her beautye to augment.
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