Gossip in a Library | Page 7

that he is not mentioned as a contributor till what was really the third edition, and that, when the first went to press, he was only eighteen years of age.
Ferrers well comprehended the taste of his age when he conceived the notion of a series of poems, in which famous kings and nobles should describe in their own persons the frailty and instability of worldly prosperity, even in those whom Fortune seems most highly to favour. One of the most popular books of the preceding century had been Lydgate's version of Boccaccio's poems on the calamities of illustrious men, a vast monody in nine books, all harping on that single chord of the universal mutability of fortune. Lydgate's Fall of Princes had, by the time that Mary ascended the throne, existed in popular esteem for a hundred years. Its language and versification were now so antiquated as to be obsolete; it was time that princes should fall to a more modern measure.
The first edition of Baldwin and Ferrers' book went to press early in 1555, but of this edition only one or two fragments exist. It was "hindered by the Lord Chancellor that then was," Stephen Gardiner, and was entirely suppressed. The leaf in the British Museum is closely printed in double columns, and suggests that Baldwin and Ferrers meant to make a huge volume of it. The death of Mary removed the embargo, and before Elizabeth had been Queen for many months, the second (or genuine first) edition of the Myrroure for Magistrates made its appearance, a thin quarto, charmingly printed in two kinds of type. This contained twenty lives--Haslewood, the only critic who has described this edition, says nineteen, but he overlooked Ferrers' tale of "Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester"--and was the work, so Baldwin tells us, of seven persons besides himself.
The first story in the book, a story which finally appears at p. 276 of the edition before us, recounts the "Fall of Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice of England, and other of his fellows, for misconstruing the laws and expounding them to serve the Prince's affections, Anno 1388." The manner in which this story is presented is a good example of the mode adopted throughout the miscellany. The corrupt judge and his fellow-lawyers appear, as in a mirror, or like personages behind the illuminated sheet at the "Chat Noir," and lamentably recount their woes in chorus. The story of Tresilian was written by Ferrers, but the persons who speak it address his companion:
Baldwin, we beseech thee with our names to begin
--which support Baldwin's claim to be looked upon as the editor of the whole book. It is very dreary doggerel, it must be confessed, but no worse than most of the poetry indited in England at that uninspired moment in the national history. A short example--a flower culled from any of these promiscuous thickets--will suffice to give a general notion of the garden. Here is part of the lament of "The Lord Clifford":
Because my father Lord John Clifford died, Slain at St. Alban's, in his prince's aid, Against the Duke my heart for malice fired, So that I could from wreck no way be stayed, But, to avenge my father's death, assayed All means I might the Duke of York to annoy, And all his kin and friends for to destroy.
This made me with my bloody dagger wound His guiltless son, that never 'gainst me stored; His father's body lying dead on ground To pierce with spear, eke with my cruel sword To part his neck, and with his head to board, Invested with a royal paper crown, From place to place to bear it up and down.
But cruelty can never 'scape the scourge Of shame, of horror, or of sudden death; Repentance self that other sins may purge Doth fly from this, so sore the soul it slayeth; Despair dissolves the tyrant's bitter breath, For sudden vengeance suddenly alights On cruel deeds to quit their bloody spites.
The only contribution to this earliest form of the Mirror which is attributed to an eminent writer, is the "Edward IV" of Skelton, and this is one of the most tuneless of all. It reminds the ear of a whining ballad snuffled out in the street at night by some unhappy minstrel that has got no work to do. As Baldwin professes to quote it from memory, Skelton being then dead, perhaps its versification suffered in his hands.
This is not the place to enter minutely into the history of the building up of this curious book. The next edition, that of 1563, was enriched by Sackville's splendid "Induction" and the tale of "Buckingham," both of which are comparatively known so well, and have been so often reprinted separately, that I need not dwell upon them here. They occupy pp. 255-271 and