into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that had passed away.  How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in Toxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey:  “In our forefathers’ time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons:  as one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry.  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. 
  Dame Nature hath her lent
  A warte upon her cheke,
  Who so lyst to seke
  In her vysage a skar
  That semyth from afar
  Lyke to the radiant star,
  All with favour fret,
  So properly it is set. 
  She is the vyolet,
  The daysy delectable,
  The columbine commendable,
  The jelofer[13] amyable;
  For this most goodly floure,
  This blossom of fressh colour,
  So Jupiter me succour,
  She flourysheth new and new
  In beaute and vertew;
  Hac claritate gemina,
  O gloriosa femina, etc.

[Footnote 13:  Gilliflower.]