=Life.=--Nicholas Udall was born in 1506, of a good family residing in Hampshire. As a lad of fourteen he entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and took his bachelor's degree there in May, 1524.[285] The years of his University life came at a period of great religious fermentation, and young Udall was, according to an old tradition,[286] one of the young enthusiasts in whom the humanistic tilling of Erasmus had prepared the soil for Lutheran doctrines from Wittenberg. We may, therefore, imagine young Udall to have been one of those of whose heretical perversities Warham complains to Wolsey.[287] Apparently Udall, as he grew older, grew if not calmer at least more cautious, and succeeded later in gaining the favour of Mary the Princess, and in retaining that of Mary the Queen. While at college, he formed a lasting friendship with John Leland, a friendship of which some poems of the latter give us a pleasing testimony.[288] Leland, of almost the same age as Udall, had taken his first degree at Cambridge in 1522, and according to an old custom, he continued his studies at Oxford, where Udall's generosity won his heart.[289] In May, 1533, a number of verses were composed by them in joint authorship, for a pageant at the coronation of Anne Boleyn.[290] In the same year Udall seems to have settled at London as a teacher. He may even have contemplated becoming a monk--like Thomas More thirty years earlier; he certainly dates his preface to the _Flowers from Terence_ from the Augustinian Monastery at London, on the last of February, 1534. In the following June he received the degree of Master of Arts from Oxford, and appears in the latter part of the same year as "Magister Informator" at Eton, succeeding Master Richard Coxe.[291] In this capacity he received payments between the last terms, 1534 and 1541.[292] We can scarcely judge at this late day of the character of Udall's educational services, but the fact that he was generally on good terms with his pupils may reasonably be inferred from the preface to the edition of the _Flowers_, printed in 1545. We may further infer with regard to his mastership at Eton, that he was himself influenced by the Eton custom of performing a play at Christmas. It appears even possible that the clause in a "consuetudinary" of Eton (about 1560), allowing the Latin school comedy to give place to an English one, if it were "witty and graceful,"[293] may have been a result of Udall's mastership. And it is probable that _Roister Doister_ was originally one of such plays unpretentiously offered by Udall to his boys,[294] modestly put aside after the performance and printed long afterwards. If all this be true, Udall's mastership deserves immortal fame in the annals of English literature. But the immortality is unfortunately of a different nature. Udall is stigmatized by one ungrateful pupil as a second _Orbilius plagosus_, the realization of Erasmus's executioner. Tusser's often quoted doggerel runs: