Vulgar words in English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction (Page 1)
This book at a glance
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SKELTON.--John Skelton, poet, priest, and buffoon, was born about the year 1460, and educated at what he calls "Alma parens, O Cantabrigensis."
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Skelton, a contemporary of the French Rabelais, seems to us a weak English portrait of that great author; like him a priest, a buffoon, a satirist, and a lampooner, but unlike him in that he has given us no English _Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_ to illustrate his age.
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Then appears a fair lady, habited in mourning, and riding on an ass, while behind her comes a dwarf, leading a caparisoned war-horse, upon which was the complete armor of a knight.
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The Lady Una, riding upon a lowly ass, shrouded by a veil, covered with a black stole, "as one that inly mourned," and leading "a milk-white lamb," is the Church.
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The ass is the symbol of her Master's lowliness, who made even his triumphant entry into Jerusalem upon "a colt the foal of an ass;" the lamb, the emblem of the innocence and of the helplessness of the "little flock;" the black stole is meant to represent the Church's trials and sorrows in her former history as well as in that naughty age.
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The public taste was so wedded to the devil of the mysteries, that he could not be given up in the moral plays: he kept his place; but a rival buffoon appeared in the person of _the vice_, who tried conclusions with the archfiend in serio-comic style until the close of the performance, when Satan always carried the vice away in triumph, as he should do.
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This play is a coarser piece than Ralph Roister Doister; the buffoon raises the devil to aid him in finding the lost needle, which is at length found, by very palpable proof, to be sticking in the seat of Goodman Hodge's breeches.
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The principal are _Old Fortunatus_, _The Honest Whore_, and _Satiro-Mastix, or, The Humorous Poet Untrussed_.
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In the Honest Whore are found those beautiful lines so often quoted: ... the best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit; The first true gentleman that ever breathed.