dern gentleman. And although tournaments were still held in the
reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his _Faerie Queene_ 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,
T