Edward VI. succeeded his father at the age of ten years--a precocious, consumptive boy, who gave over his struggle with life when only sixteen; and yet has left his “Works,” printed by the Roxburgh Club. There’s a maturity about some of the political suggestions in his “Journal”--not unusual in a lively mind prematurely ripening under stress of disease; yet we can hardly count him a literary king. The red reign of Mary, immediately following, lasted only five years, for which, I think, all Christian England thanked God: In those five years very many of the strong men of whom we have talked in this chapter came to a fiery end. Only one name of literary significance do we pluck from the annals of her time; it is that of Roger Ascham,[84] the writer of her Latin letters, and for a considerable time her secretary. How, being a Protestant as he was, and an undissembling one, he kept his head upon his shoulders so near her throne, it is hard to conjecture. He must have studied the art of keeping silence as well as the arts of speech. He was born in that rich, lovely region of Yorkshire--watered by the River Swale--where we found the young Wyclif: his father was a house-steward; but he early made show of such qualities as invited the assistance of rich friends, through whose offices he was entered at St. John’s College, Cambridge, at fifteen, and took his degree at eighteen. He was full of American pluck, aptness, and industry; was known specially for his large gifts in language; a superb penman too, which was no little accomplishment in that day; withal, he excelled in athletics, and showed a skill with the long-bow which made credible the traditions about Robin Hood. They said he wasted time at this exercise; whereupon he wrote a defence of Archery, which under the name of _Toxophilus_ has come down to our day--a model even now of good, homely, vigorous English. “He that will write well in any tongue,” said he, “must follow this counsel--to speak as the common people do--to think as wise men do.” Our teachers of rhetoric could hardly say a better thing to-day. The subject of Archery was an important one at that period; the long-bow was still the principal war weapon of offence: there were match-locks, indeed, but these very cumbrous and counting for less than those “cloth-yard” shafts which had won the battle of Agincourt. The boy-King, Edward, to whom Ascham taught penmanship, was an adept at archery, and makes frequent allusion to that exercise in his Journal. In every hamlet practice at the long-bow was obligatory; and it was ordered by statute that no person above the age of twenty-four, should shoot the light-flight arrow at a distance under two hundred and twenty yards. What would our Archery Clubs say to this? And what, to the further order--dating in Henry VIII.’s time--that “all bow-staves should be three fingers thick and seven feet long?”