Skelton directed his ribaldry especially against the mendicant friars and the formidable Wolsey. We can easily imagine how these audacities were not intolerable to the "Defender of the Faith," even in the plenitude of the cardinal's power; and how he might have tolerated his assumption of the character of court-poet, so long as the spurious laureate's sallies did not trench on the sovereign's personal dignity. Skelton, like his quondam royal pupil, was already a reformer in his way, and not long before his death, which occurred June 21, 1529, just before the downfall of Wolsey, he used a strange argument against the celibacy of the priesthood; he excused himself for having openly lived with a concubine, because he considered her as his wife! Erasmus, the caustic censor of the vices of the clergy, praised Skelton's learning and wit, probably from sympathy with his application of them, bolder, though far less dignified than his own, to the same objects of satire; but "the glory of the priesthood and the shame," could hardly have admitted the validity of such an apology from the Vicar of Dallyng, a vowed celibate priest. We must return for a moment to Bernard. This poet-laureate had a notable subject to begin with in the union of the Two Roses. How he treated it we have no means of judging, as the performance is not in existence; and though it has perished, it would be unfair, perhaps, to assume that his freshest effort on an event that might have quickened the slowest fancy, was not superior to his later exercises, on occasions of weaker interest, such as are preserved in the Cottonian Library, and that of New College, Oxford. Of all the events in the history of the British monarchy, there is one subject, and probably one only, of those that could come within the range of a court-poet's province, of equal national importance, and equally poetical quality with the marriage of Henry the Seventh--that is, the marriage of his daughter, Margaret, to James the Fourth of Scotland; and even those of our "constant readers" who, to their loss, may know nothing of William Dunbar but what they have read in former pages of this magazine, must know that the court of Scotland, at the time of the celebration of these nuptials, possessed a poet worthy of the subject, for they cannot have forgotten his inspired vision on the Thistle and the Rose. In the one case the wounds of England were closed after long wars of disputed succession, as desolating as any intestine wars on record: in the other, two nations, jealous neighbours, and till then implacable enemies, formed an alliance that promised to be lasting, and which finally effected more than it had promised, by the consolidation of the two thrones into one. On the head of the Scottish great-grandson of the English Margaret, the double crown was secure from the casuistry of jurists. Neither Elizabeth of York, nor her daughter, was a happy wife. Henry the Seventh proved cold and ungrateful as a