years of the reign of Henry VII, and was a fairly busy writer throughout the first quarter of the new century, wrote nothing during the subsequent thirty years of his long life. He appears to have forsaken literature to win a reputation as a preacher, and, according to the Catholic poet William Forrest, as an entertaining character. His association with the more unbending Protestants probably had a short life. To Barclay's later years Fr. Aurelius Pompen's monumental study of the English versions of the Ship of Fools 2 makes no reference; it is the earlier Barclay he is dealing with, busily occupied in the college of Ottery St. Mary on his very free rendering of Brandt's Narrenschiff for Richard Pynson. Fr. Pompen's task has been to explore the problems of the relationship of Barclay's version to the German, Latin, and French versions that the translator says he used. But Wynkyn de Worde anticipated Pynson's edition with a prose version by a poor and probably needy dependant named Watson. The prose version, therefore, has also been included in Fr. Pompen's study. Brandt's satire had appeared with its famous woodcuts in 1494. Four years later Bergmann, the Basel printer of the original edition, issued a version much 'humanized' by James Locher (Philomusus), in Latin hexameters in which the Teutonic raciness would have been quite lost but for the retention of the woodcuts. A French version of Locher by Rivière in octosyllables appeared some months later at Paris, and a Lyons printer issued a prose version of Rivière by a needy scribe named Drouyn. These editions, German, Latin, and French, had all appeared, with the illustrations, original or derived, by 1499. It was ten years later that Pynson provided a set of woodcuts for Barclay and published his version. Fr. Pompen has shown (1) that Barclay's indebtedness to the original Brandt is negligible, though there is evidence that he had, as he says, 'oversene the first inuencion in Doche'; (2) that he followed mainly Locher's Latin and Rivière's French. Consequently he claims that Barclay's work exemplifies, not so much the influence of Germany as of France in the English Renaissance. In this, as in his attack on Professor

2 The English Versions of the Ship of Fools: A Contribution to the History of the Early French Renaissance in England, by Fr. Aurelius Pompen, O.F.M., with 4 plates. Longmans. pp. xiv + 345. 25s. net.

Herford for emphasizing the influence of Brandt's work in his Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century, he goes much too far. The woodcuts, at least, remained un-Latinized, their Teutonic spirit of satire never losing more of its sting than was sacrificed by inferior craftsmen. As for de Worde's edition done by the pedestrian Watson, it was based, Fr. Pompen shows, appropriately enough on the similar journeyman work done by Drouyn for the Lyons printer. In closing this short notice we must refer to the appreciative recognition of Barclay's independence and character and the excellent good spirits that mark this important work. Fr. Pompen leaves us in no doubt as to the enjoyment he has won from his labours.

Dr. and Mrs. P. S. Allen, whose magnum opus, the Erasmi Epistolae, is now reaching its seventh volume, have increased our debt to them by editing, as though to interpose a little ease, a charming collection of the prose writings of Sir Thomas More,3 a gift to English readers the more welcome since, to our shame, nothing of the sort existed later than the seven pages of More given by Dr. Johnson in the matter prefatory to his Dictionary, to illustrate the history of the language. In his introduction Dr. Allen has included Erasmus' Life of More from the letter to von Hutten of 1519, and a great part of Roper's Life. All More's English prose works are represented and the best of the letters. What is particularly pleasing is that the lighter side of More's wisdom and character is illustrated abundantly and, needless to say, with delightful tact. We are made to feel once more how inseparable these were from the fine inflexibility of More's temper and convictions. If there is anything that one is half inclined to regret it is that Dr. and Mrs. Allen have not followed the example set by Dr. Johnson and included some of More's English verse.

Reference must be made also here to the lecture on Erasmus' Services to Learning read by Dr. Allen before the British Academy on 8th July 1925.

3 Sir Thomas More: Selections from his English works, ed. by P. S. and H. M. Allen. O.U.P. pp. xiv + 191. 3s. 6d.

4

• Erasmus' Services to Learning, by P. S. Allen. Proceedings of the British Academy. O.U.P. pp. 20. 1s. 6d.

5

Mr. Ernest Dormer tells us that fourteen years ago Dr. Furnivall set him to work on an inquiry into the life and activities of William Gray, a controversial ballad-writer and active supporter-with an eye to his own interests-of Cromwell and Somerset. He appears, according to Puttenham, to have written a political version of The Hunte is up attacking the Pilgrimage of Grace, as well as the verses known as the Fantassie of Idolatrie, which Foxe printed with approval in his Acts and Monuments. He acted as an intermediary between Cromwell and Grafton in the business of the printing of the Bible, and after Cromwell's death became engaged in a ballad flyting with Thomas Smith, Clerk of the Council, in which he was alleged to have attacked his former patron. Mr. Dormer deals fully with the rewards in manors and abbey lands near Reading that fell to Gray and with the losses he sustained on the occasion of Somerset's first imprisonment. Mr. Dormer

prints Gray's ballads in full as well as his unusual epitaph, which has more than ordinary interest because some stanzas from it are found in Tottel. It is a curious fact that these stanzas were also found on a tomb at Sonning in the church of Gray's manor of Bulmershe.

6

Among things that puzzle the student of Tudor literature is the distance that separated the practice and the theory of usury. Mr. R. H. Tawney's scholarly introduction to his edition of Thomas Wilson's Discourse of Usury (1572) makes plain what for most of us was confused. One cannot do justice in a paragraph to Mr. Tawney's richly documented introductory essay, in which, it must be noted, he draws freely for his illustrations upon his unusual familiarity with the dramatists. It must suffice to say that it places Wilson's Discourse in its right setting as a rather pathetic anachronism in the age of a Gresham. To most of us Wilson is known as the author of the Art of Logic and the Art of Rhetoric, the works of his early graduate days, written before he was thirty. It is to the first of these

• Gray of Reading: A sixteenth-century Controversialist and BalladWriter, by Ernest W. Dormer. Reading: Bradley. pp. 158. 158. 6d. net. • A Discourse upon Usury, by Thomas Wilson. Ed. by R. H. Tawney. Bell. pp. viii+392. 15s. net.

treatises that we owe our knowledge that it was Nicholas Udall, Wilson's schoolmaster at Eton, who wrote Roister Doister; whilst the other, the Art of Rhetoric, has given more than one phrase to Tudor prose: 'ynk-horne termes', 'far-fetched colours of straunge antiquitie'. Wilson left Eton for King's, Cambridge, in the year of Udall's dismissal; and the present writer is pleased to think that his discovery of a Udall law-suit has shown that he had not forfeited Wilson's regard. This suit and its bearing on the date of Roister Doister are discussed in an article (R. E. S., July) entitled Nicholas Udall and Thomas Wilson. Curiously, the suit turns on what appears to be an abuse of the Act of Usury of 1552, an Act of which Mr. Tawney has much to say.

Another work primarily addressed to historians falls to be noticed here, a series of lectures delivered at King's College, London, on the Social and Political Ideas of some great Thinkers of the Renaissance and Reformation. The subjects are Nicolas of Cusa (E. F. Jacob), Sir John Fortescue (Miss A. E. Levett), Machiavelli (F. J. C. Hearnshaw), More (A. W. Reed), Erasmus (J. A. K. Thomson), Luther (J. W. Allen), and Calvin (W. R. Matthews). Particular interest attaches to the first two papers as fifteenth-century studies removed by their date from the more familiar ground covered by those that follow. Reference must also be made to the introductory essay by the Editor on the Renaissance and Reformation.

8

Mr. C. L. Kingsford's Prejudice and Promise in FifteenthCentury England is a work of considerable value for the student of literature. The editor of Fifteenth-Century Prose and Verse, Professor A. W. Pollard, pointed out in his Introduction more than twenty years ago that no period of literature was ever more wantonly plundered than the fifteenth century

7 Social and Political Ideas of some great Thinkers of the Renaissance and Reformation, a series of Lectures delivered at King's College, University of London. Ed. by F. J. C. Hearnshaw, with introduction by Ernest Barker, Harrap. pp. viii+215. 7s. 6d.

8 Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth-Century England, by C. L. Kingsford. O.U.P. pp. vi+215. 15s. net.

to enrich its prosperous neighbours on either side. The literary historians then placed the English Mandeville nearly fifty years too early and postponed the beginnings of Renaissance drama till they were well on into the sixteenth century; to which century they also referred the industry of translation, which had been in full swing since 1380. Mr. Kingsford finds that the same offence is still being committed, and his Ford Lectures (1923-4) aim at correcting this well-established error. The sources that Shakespeare used, perforce, for his Histories are to blame for much of the prejudice that Mr. Kingsford attacks, and his first lecture should be read by Shakespearians. It is of the promise, however, rather than the prejudice that we look to Mr. Kingsford for evidences. The first extant letter written in English by one Englishman to another belongs, he tells us, to the year 1392; the next to 1400; and the oldest connected series of letters preserved passed between Henry V and the City of London, whilst a soldier wrote home from France in 1419 praying that they may come soon out of this unlusty soldier's life into the life of England'. This was the century that witnessed the rise of English letter-writing; and the Paston Letters, though a happy survival, are not unique. It was an age of educational progress, marked by the foundation of schools, of which Eton is only the most famous in a large number. Books and their owners, literary bequests and the foundation of libraries are among the other subjects touched upon in the lecture entitled English Letters and the Intellectual Ferment. The remaining lectures, on 'Social Life', 'London in the Fifteenth Century', and, in its own way, 'West-country Piracy', all speak of the promise of the century. Mr. Kingsford makes a powerful plea for the recognition of the virtues of Suffolk, 'one of the finest types of the old chivalry, and through his intellectual sympathies a forerunner of the new order'.

9

If to Mr. Kingsford the fifteenth century is an age of promise, to Professor Huizinga it is a time of waning and dying. His important study of the art, the thought, and life of France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Waning of the Middle Ages, by J. Huizinga. Arnold. pp. vi+328.