Skelton was popularly known as a Poet Laureate, and in the earliest edition of his poems, which bears no date, but is about 1520, he is described on the title-page as ‘Mayster Skelton, Poet Laureate,’ as he also is in the first collected edition of 1568, ‘Pithy pleasaunt and profitable works of Maister Skelton, Poete Laureate.’ This title was the University title, and not a royal one. Spenser is sometimes reckoned amongst the Poets Laureate; but, as a matter of fact, he had no right to the title at all, nor did he or his publishers ever assume it. He is, of course, one of the poetical glories of Cambridge, but he was never laureated there, nor did Queen Elizabeth ever appoint him her poet, though she granted him £50 a year. The first Laureate, in the modern sense of the word, is undoubtedly Ben Jonson, to whom Charles I. made out a patent conferring upon this famous man £100 a year and ‘a terse of Canary Spanish wine,’ which latter benefit the miserable Pye commuted for £27. From Jonson to Tennyson there is no breach of continuity, for Sir William Davenant, who was appointed in 1638, survived till the Restoration, dying in 1668. The list is a curious one, and is just worth printing: Jonson, Davenant, Dryden, Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Rowe, the Rev. Laurence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, the Rev. Thomas Warton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Lord Tennyson. One must be charitable in these matters. Here are fourteen names and four great ones--Jonson, Dryden, Wordsworth and Tennyson; two distinguished ones--Nicholas Rowe and Robert Southey; two clever names--Shadwell and Colley Cibber; two respectable names--Tate and Warton; one interesting name--Davenant; and three unutterable names--Eusden, Whitehead and Pye. After all, it is not so very bad. The office was offered to Gray, and he refused it. Pope, as a Roman Catholic, was out of the question. It would have suited Thomson well enough, and have tickled Goldsmith’s fancy mightily. Collins died too young. But Eusden, Whitehead and Pye, how did they manage it? and what in the name of wonder did they write? Eusden was of Irish extraction, but was born the son of an English clergyman, and was like most poets a Cambridge man. He owed his appointment in 1718 to the Duke of Newcastle of the period, whose favour he had won by a poem addressed to him on the occasion of his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin. But he had also qualified for the office by verses sacred to the memory of George I., and in praise of George II. ‘Hail, mighty monarch! whom desert alone Would, without birthright, raise up to the throne, Thy virtues shine peculiarly nice, Ungloomed with a confinity to vice.’ To do Grub Street justice, it was very angry with this appointment, and Hesiod Cooke wrote a poem called ‘The Battle of the Poets,’ in which the new Laureate was severely but truthfully handled in verse not conspicuously better than his own: