From Ezekiel Sanford's ‘The Works of the British Poets’ (Philadelphia, 1819), I, pp. 259–61).
Sanford (1796–1822) was an American historian. The selection from Skelton which accompanies this introduction appears to be the first American publication of any of Skelton's works.
JOHN SKELTON, an eccentric satyrist, was born towards the close of the fifteenth century. The two universities dispute the honour of his education; but neither seems to have established a very strong title. The poet-laureateship was then a degree of the universities. Caxton says, our author was made laureate at Oxford; and Mr. Malone tells us, that he wore the laurel publicly at Cambridge.
In 1507, we find him curate of Trompington, and rector of Diss in Norfolk. But he is supposed to have added little dignity to his calling. His pulpit, it is said, became a theatre, and he, a buffoon. It was the business of his life to lampoon Lilly, the grammarian, cardinal Wolsey, the Scots, and the mendicant friars. There is no doubt, that the clergy were then sufficiently corrupt; but it was not for a man, who kept a concubine, to accuse the immorality of others; and the whole tenor of Skelton's life shows him to have been ignorant of the wholesome doctrine, that reform, like charity, should begin at home.
Wolsey, at last, thought his satires worthy of notice, and ordered him to be apprehended. He took refuge in Westminster abbey; and was protected by Islip, the abbot, till his death in June, 1529. He was buried in St. Margaret's church-yard; and the inscription in his tomb is: -
J. SCELTONUS Vates Pierius hic setus est.
Animam egit 21 Juno An. Dom. MDXXIX.
Erasmus, in a letter to Henry VIII., called Skelton Brittanicarum literarum decus et lumen. The praise may have been just in his own day; but, at present, Skelton is far from being considered as the light, or the ornament, of British literature. He is, however, the father of English Macaronics; a species of poetry, which consists chiefly in interweaving Latin phrases with his native language. It was his ambition to be grotesque and droll; and the devices, to which he resorted for this purpose, gained him the epithet of the ‘inventive Skelton.’ His inventions are, indeed, entitled to the praise of originality. He first hunts up all the words, in Latin and English, which will chime with each other; and, having then set them down in a string, or tacked them to the end of as many short phrases, imagines that he has been writing poetry. Sense and prosody are entirely abandoned; and he has sometimes even given us lines which consist altogether of the nine digits. His poems are generally long; and, as all his fire goes out, while he is in search of rhymes, they are excessively monotonous and dull. For a specimen of his best manner, we extract the exordium to the ‘Boke of Colin Clout’. The reader will see how one rhyme after another seduces him from the sense, till at last he loses sight of it altogether.
[Quotes lines 1–37.]