The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into England by the translation of the _Romaunt of the Rose_, reached its extremity in Stephen Hawes's _Passetyme of Pleasure_, printed by Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, finally won the love of La Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose culture was exclusively mediaeval. His contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his _Bowge of Courte_ (Court Entertainment or Dole), and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But his later poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him _Skeltonical_. This was a sort of glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional intermixture of French and Latin. Her beautye to augment. Dame Nature hath her lent A warte upon her cheke, Who so lyst to seke In her vysage a skar That semyth from afar Lyke to the radiant star, All with favour fret, So properly it is set. She is the vyolet, The daysy delectable, The columbine commendable, The jelofer[13] amyable; For this most goodly floure, This blossom of fressh colour, So Jupiter me succour, She flourysheth new and new In beaute and vertew; _Hac claritate gemina, O gloriosa femina_, etc. [Footnote 13: Gilliflower.] Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His _Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng_ is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's _Jolly Beggars_. His _Phyllyp Sparrowe_ is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus's elegy on Lesbia's sparrow. In _Spake, Parrot_, and _Why Come ye not to Courte?_ he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529. Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as the "one light and ornament of British letters." Caxton asserts that he had read Vergil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, "I suppose he hath dronken of Elycon's well."