But one step, and that a short one, removed from these writers is Alexander Barclay, translater of Brandt’s Stultifera Navis, priest and monk successively of Ottery St. Mary, Ely, and Canterbury.  It seems to have been about 1514, when at the second of these houses, that he composed at least the earlier and larger portion of his eclogues.  They appeared at various dates, the first complete edition being appended, long after the writer’s death, to the Ship of Fools of 1570.[86] They are there headed ’Certayne Egloges of Alexander Barclay Priest, Whereof the first three conteyne the misereyes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in generall, Gathered out of a booke named in Latin, Miseriae Curialium, compiled by Eneas Silvius[87] Poet and Oratour.’  This sufficiently indicates what we are to expect of Barclay as of the Latin eclogists of the previous century.  The interlocutors in these three poems are Coridon, a young shepherd anxious to seek his fortune at court, and the old Cornix, for whom the great world has long lost its glamour.  The fourth eclogue, ‘treating of the behavour of Rich men against Poets,’ is similarly ’taken out of’ Mantuan.  In it Barclay is supposed to have directed a not very individual but pretty lusty satire against Skelton.[88] He also introduces, as recited by one of the characters, ’The description of the Towre of vertue and honour, into which the noble Howarde contended to enter by worthy actes of chivalry,’ a stanzaic composition in honour of Sir Edward Howard, who died in 1513.  The fifth eclogue, ’of the disputation of Citizens and men of the Countrey,’ or the Cytezen and Uplondyshman, as it was originally styled, again presents us with a familiar theme treated in the conventional manner, and closes the series.  These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they reducible to metre—­in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refashioned however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again in the Shepherd’s Calender.  The following lines from the fifth eclogue may serve to illustrate Barclay’s style: 

    I shall not deny our payne and servitude,
    I knowe that plowmen for the most part be rude,
    Nowe shall I tell thee high matters true and olde,
    Which curteous Candidus unto me once tolde,
    Nought shall I forge nor of no leasing bable,
    This is true history and no surmised fable.

It is in justice due to Barclay to say that the fact of his composing this eclogue in the vernacular should possibly be counted to him as an original step.  The step had, indeed, been taken in Italy before he was born, but of this he may, in spite of his travels, have been ignorant.  Such credit as attaches to the innovation should be allowed him.