SKELTON.—­John Skelton, poet, priest, and buffoon, was born about the year 1460, and educated at what he calls “Alma parens, O Cantabrigensis.”  Tutor to Prince Henry, afterward Henry VIII., he could boast, “The honour of England I lernyd to spelle.”  That he was highly esteemed in his day we gather from the eulogium of Erasmus, then for a short time professor of Greek at Oxford:  “Unum Brittanicarum literarum lumen et decus.”  By another contemporary he is called the “inventive Skelton.”  As a priest he was not very holy; for, in a day when the marriage of the clergy was worse than their incontinence, he contracted a secret marriage.  He enjoyed for a time the patronage of Wolsey, but afterward joined his enemies and attacked him violently.  He was laureated:  this does not mean, as at present, that he was poet laureate of England, but that he received a degree of which that was the title.

His works are direct delineations of the age.  Among these are “monodies” upon Kynge Edwarde the forthe, and the Earle of Northumberlande.  He corrects for Caxton “The boke of the Eneydos composed by Vyrgyle.”  He enters heartily into numerous literary quarrels; is a reformer to the extent of exposing ecclesiastical abuses in his Colin Clout; and scourges the friars and bishops alike; and in this work, and his “Why come ye not to Courte?” he makes a special target of Wolsey, and the pomp and luxury of his household.  He calls him “Mad Amelek, like to Mamelek” (Mameluke), and speaks

    Of his wretched original
    And his greasy genealogy. 
    He came from the sank (blood) royal
    That was cast out of a butcher’s stall.

This was the sorest point upon which he could touch the great cardinal and prime minister of Henry VIII.

Historically considered, one work of Skelton is especially valuable, for it places him among the first of English dramatists.  The first effort of the modern drama was the miracle play; then came the morality; after that the interlude, which was soon merged into regular tragedy and comedy.  Skelton’s “Magnyfycence,” which he calls “a goodly interlude and a merie,” is, in reality, a morality play as well as an interlude, and marks the opening of the modern drama in England.

The peculiar verse of Skelton, styled skeltonical, is a sort of English anacreontic.  One example has been given; take, as another, the following lampoon of Philip of Spain and the armada: 

    A skeltonicall salutation
    Or condigne gratulation
    And just vexation
    Of the Spanish nation,
    That in bravado
    Spent many a crusado
    In setting forth an armado
    England to invado.

    Who but Philippus,
    That seeketh to nip us,
    To rob us and strip us,
    And then for to whip us,
    Would ever have meant
    Or had intent
    Or hither sent
    Such strips of charge, etc., etc.