There are, nevertheless, clear grounds for regarding this Century of good things as a gathering to which More and Heywood were contributors, rather than as the exclusive property of either of them, or of any one else. For we see, for instance, that in the fortieth story a man so celebrated and even notorious as Skelton, and at the time of the publication of the _Tales_ still living, is described as “one Master Skelton, a poet laureate,” which seems to argue the presence behind the scenes of an editor not very conversant with contemporary literature or literary history; and this might be possibly true of Rastell the printer, but could not be so of More or of Heywood. But then, only a little way farther--in the forty-eighth anecdote--we are confronted with the admirable apologue “Of the friar that told the three children’s fortunes,” where, after declaring to the horrified mother that of her family one should be a beggar, a second a thief, and the third an assassin, he consoles her by saying that she might make the one who was to be a beggar _a friar_, the one who was to be a thief _a lawyer_, and him who was destined to be a murderer _a physician_. Here we recognise the touch and individuality of no ordinary pen, and discover an additional explanation of the reluctance which the compiler or contributors felt to couple any names with the volume. Attacks on the Romish Church were treated in 1526 with a larger measure of toleration than heretofore; but in this jest three obnoxious callings, including that of More himself, are exposed to satire. One drawback to the dramatic completeness of the anecdote is the aspersion which the Friar Mendicant is made to cast on his own cloth; and we at the same time cannot avoid discerning a trace of the root of the incident in some _fabliau_ composed in far more primitive times than those of the appearance of the first English jest-book. For we are introduced to the wife of a very rich man, standing at the entrance of her husband’s dwelling, accompanied by her children, and subsequently with her own hands spreading the repast, of which the friar partakes. The intention was to create a laugh at the cost of the three vocations; but the _rédacteur_ neglected to observe all the conditions necessary to render the hit perfectly true to art. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XIV. “MERRY TALES AND QUICK ANSWERS.” But there is a second work which, in point of date and character, is sufficiently near to that which we have just quitted to warrant a conclusion that the editor had in its production an eye to the earlier book. Many of the jests in _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_, printed about 1530, resemble those which I have almost convinced myself that Sir Thomas More and John Heywood contributed to the volume from Rastell’s press; but, on the whole, the collection is of inferior interest and value, and owes more to foreign and classical sources.