(a) From an incomplete elegy on the poet George Gascoigne, which Gascoigne meets various English poets in Hades. Taken from ‘The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573–80’, edited by E. J. L. Scott (1884), p. 57.
…Acquayntaunce take of Chaucer first
And then wuth Gower and Lydgate dine.And cause thou art a merry mate
Lo Scoggin where he lawghes aloane
And Skelton that same madbrayned knave
Looke how he knawes a deade horse boane
(b) From Gabriel Harvey's ‘Four Letters and Certaine Sonnets’ (1592), p. 7 (STC 12900). The work is primarily an attack on Robert Greene and his followers, with whom Skelton and his alter ego Scoggin are linked. They appear later in the same work (pp. 12–13).
Salust, and Clodius learned of Tully to frame artificial Declamations, and partheticall Inuectives against Tully himself, and other worthy members of that State: if mother Hubbard in the vaine of Chawcer, happened to tell one Canicular (1) tale; father Elderton, (2) and his sonne Greene, in the vaine of Skelton, or Scoggin, will counterfeitan an hundred dogged Fables, Libles, Calumnies, Slaunders, Lies for the whetstone, what not, and most currishly snarle and bite where they should most kindly fawne and licke.
1 Literally ‘to do with a dog’; cf. the punning reference to ‘an hundred dogged Fables…’.
2 William Elderton (d. 1592?), an Elizabethan actor and ballad writer.