The Palace of Pleasure | Page 9

which runs nearly through
every age. It might be Victor Cousin reproving Victor Hugo, or, say, M.
Renan protesting, if he could protest, against M. Zola. Nor is the

diatribe against the evil communication that had corrupted good
manners any novelty in the quarrel. Critics have practically recognised
that letters are a reflex of life long before Matthew Arnold formulated
the relation. And in the disputing between Classicists and Romanticists
it has invariably happened that the Classicists were the earlier
generation, and therefore more given to convention, while the
Romanticists were likely to be experimental in life as in literature.
Altogether then, we must discount somewhat Ascham's fierce
denunciation, of the Italianate Englishman, and of the Englishing of
Italian books.
There can be little doubt, I think, that in the denunciation of the
"bawdie stories" introduced from Italy, Ascham was thinking mainly
and chiefly of Painter's "Palace of Pleasure." The whole passage is later
than the death of Sir Thomas Sackville in 1566, and necessarily before
the death of Ascham in December 1568. Painter's First Tome appeared
in 1566, and his Second Tome in 1567. Of its immediate and striking
success there can be no doubt. A second edition of the first Tome
appeared in 1569, the year after Ascham's death, and a second edition
of the whole work in 1575, the first Tome thus going through three
editions in nine years. It is therefore practically certain that Ascham
had Painter's book in his mind[9] in the above passage, which may be
taken as a contemporary criticism of Painter, from the point of view of
an adherent of the New-Old Learning, who conveniently forgot that
scarcely a single one of the Latin classics is free from somewhat similar
blemishes to those he found in Painter and his fellow-translators from
the Italian.
[Footnote 9: Ascham was shrewd enough not to advertise the book he
was denouncing by referring to it by name. I have failed to find in the
Stationer's Register of 1566-8 any similar book to which his remarks
could apply, except Fenton's Tragicall Discourses, and that was from
the French.]
But it is time to turn to the book which roused Ascham's ire so greatly,
and to learn something of it and its author.[10] William Painter was
probably a Kentishman, born somewhere about 1525.[11] He seems to

have taken his degree at one of the Universities, as we find him head
master of Sevenoaks' school about 1560, and the head master had to be
a Bachelor of Arts. In the next year, however, he left the pædagogic
toga for some connection with arms, for on 9 Feb. 1561, he was
appointed Clerk of the Ordnance, with a stipend of eightpence per diem,
and it is in that character that he figures on his title page. He soon after
married Dorothy Bonham of Dowling (born about 1537, died 1617),
and had a family of at least five children. He acquired two important
manors in Gillingham, co. Kent, East Court and Twidall. Haslewood is
somewhat at a loss to account for these possessions. From documents I
have discovered and printed in an Appendix, it becomes only too clear,
I fear, that Painter's fortune had the same origin as too many private
fortunes, in peculation of public funds.
[Footnote 10: See Haslewood's account, reprinted infra, p. xxxvii., to
which I have been able to add a few documents in the Appendix.]
[Footnote 11: His son, in a document of 1591, speaks of him as his
aged father (Appendix infra, p. lvii.).]
So far as we can judge from the materials at our disposal, it would
seem that Painter obtained his money by a very barefaced procedure.
He seems to have moved powder and other materials of war from
Windsor to the Tower, charged for them on delivery at the latter place
as if they had been freshly bought, and pocketed the proceeds. On the
other hand, it is fair to Painter to say that we only have the word of his
accusers for the statement, though both he and his son own to certain
undefined irregularities. It is, at any rate, something in his favour that
he remained in office till his death, unless he was kept there on the
principle of setting a peculator to catch a peculator. I fancy, too, that
the Earl of Warwick was implicated in his misdeeds, and saved him
from their consequences.
His works are but few. A translation from the Latin account, by
Nicholas Moffan, of the death of the Sultan Solyman,[12] was made by
him in 1557. In 1560 an address in prose, prefixed to Dr. W. Fulke's
Antiprognosticon, was signed "Your familiar friend, William
Paynter,"[13] and dated "From Sevenoke xxii. of Octobre;" and the

same volume contains Latin verses entitled "Gulielmi Painteri,
ludimagistri Seuenochensis Tetrastichon." It