And again:—­

    “Laymen say indeed,
    How they (the priests) take no heed
    Their silly sheep to feed,
    But pluck away and pull
    The fleeces of their wool.”

But he adds:—­

    “Of no good bishop speak I,
    Nor good priest I decry,
    Good friar, nor good chanon,*
    Good nun, nor good canon,
    Good monk, nor good clerk,
    Nor yet no good work: 
    But my recounting is
    Of them that do amiss.”

    Same as canon.

Yet, although Skelton said he would not decry any good man or any good work, his spirit was a mocking one.  He was fond of harsh jests and rude laughter, and no person or thing was too high or too holy to escape his sharp wit.  “He was doubtless a pleasant conceited fellow, and of a very sharp wit,” says a writer about sixty years later, “exceeding bold, and would nip to the very quick when he once set hold."*

William Webbe.

And being bold as bitter, and having set hold with hatred upon Wolsey, he in another poem called Why come ye not to Court? and in still another called Speake, Parrot, wrote directly against the Cardinal.  Yet although Skelton railed against the Cardinal and against the evils in the Church, he was no Protestant.  He believed in the Church of Rome, and would have been sorry to think that he had helped the “heretics.”

Wolsey was still powerful, and he made up his mind to silence his enemy, so Skelton found himself more than once in prison, and at last to escape the Cardinal’s anger he was forced to take sanctuary in Westminster.  There he remained until he died a few months before his great enemy fell from power.

As many of Skelton’s poems were thus about quarrels over religion and politics, much of the interest in them has died.  Yet, as he himself says,

    “For although my rhyme is ragged,
    Tattered and jagged,
    Rudely rain-beaten,
    Rust and moth eaten,
    If ye take well therewith,
    It hath in it some pith.”

And it is well to remember the name of Colin Cloute at least, because a later and much greater poet borrowed that name for one of his own poems, as you shall hear.

But the poem which keeps most interest for us is one which perhaps at the time it was written was thought least important.  It is called The Book of Philip Sparrow.  And this poem shows us that Skelton was not always bitter and biting.  For it is neither bitter nor coarse, but is a dainty and tender lament written for a schoolgirl whose sparrow had been killed by a cat.  It is written in the same short lines as Colin Cloute and others of Skelton’s poems—­“Breathless rhymes"* they have been called.  These short lines remind us somewhat of the old Anglo-Saxon short half-lines, except that they rime.  They are called after their author “Skeltonical.”

Bishop Hall.