the Soldan, his marriage with Berengaria, and his delivery from the dungeon of the base Duke of Austria, were subjects as pregnant as any of the adventures of Hercules, an idol of hero-worship whom he in some respects resembles. In King John's reign, the poets seem to have been against the king, and in favour of the opposing barons. Whether he consoled himself with the stipendiary services of a court poet, we do not discover. Throughout his long and troubled reign he seems to have been pelted with lampoons. In the year 1251, reign of Henry III., the King's versifier was requited by an annual pension of 100 shillings--not such a very niggardly stipend as it now sounds, if we compare the value of money in those times with the price of commodities. In the two following reigns we find a poet-royal of some repute in Robert Baston. He was a Carmelite monk, and attained the dignity of prior of the convent of that order at Scarborough. Bishop Bale (in his _Illustrûm Majoris Britanniæ Scriptorum Summarium_) says that Baston was a laureated poet and public orator at Oxford, which Wood denies. But Bale might have had access to information which could no longer be authenticated in Anthony's time; for Bale, though he lived to be Edward the Sixth's Bishop of Assory, and a prebendary of the Cathedral of Canterbury, where he died and was buried, had himself been a Carmelite friar. "Great confusion," observes Warton, "has entered into the subject of the institution of poets-laureate, on account of the degrees in grammar, which included rhetoric and versification, anciently taken in our universities, particularly at Oxford, on which occasion a wreath of laurel was presented to the new graduate, who was afterwards usually styled Poeta Laureatus. These scholastic laureations, however, seem to have given rise to the appellation in question. With regard to the poet-laureate of the Kings of England, he is undoubtedly the same that is styled the king's versifier in the thirteenth century. But when or how that title commenced, and whether this officer was ever formally crowned with laurel at his first investiture, I will not pretend to determine, after the researches of the learned Seldon have proved unsuccessful. It seems probable that at length those only were in general invited to this appointment who had received academical sanction, and had merited a crown of laurel in the universities for their abilities in Latin composition, particularly Latin versification. Thus the king's laureate was nothing more than a graduated rhetorician, employed in the king's service." Warton adds an opinion, which seems well founded, "that it was not customary for the royal laureate to write in English till the Reformation had begun to diminish the veneration for the Latin tongue, or rather till the love of novelty, and a better sense of things, had banished the pedantry of monastic erudition, and taught us to cultivate our native language."