The good knight himself, however, was part of a world less verbally or outwardly prudish than ours. He had only to dip into the written literature of his time to find plenty of such anecdotes as he introduced into his book, and as have become familiar to us through the collections of _fabliaux_, where numerous examples offer themselves to our view of the identical conditions of ancient domestic life. I shall not attempt to decide whether the moral atmosphere of France in the thirteenth century was better or worse than that which we breathe; but the knight and his family were surrounded by it, and knew no other. Of the other jest-books falling within the biographical category, the _Jests of George Peele_ and the _Conceits of Hobson_ are palpable _réchauffés_--warmed-up dishes of stale viands. The same is to be predicated of _Dobson’s Dry Bobs_, which claims on the title-page to be a kind of sequel to Scogin. _Tarlton’s Jests_ present the aspect of a tolerably contemporary, if not homogeneous and individual, assortment of witticisms and exploits. They are chiefly redolent of the court and the theatre, the two scenes of his activity and triumphs; and if all the things which they make him say or do were not said or done by him, it is not easy to point out the sources to which the editor of the original book went. Tarlton was undoubtedly a man of rare powers, and his celebrity must have long outlived him. He died in the plague-year 1588, before Shakespear came to settle in London, yet not before the great dramatist might have seen him and spoken to him; and for some time I have entertained a suspicion that he may be the Yorick of _Hamlet_. The _Jest of the Widow Edith, the lying Widow which still liveth_, is an early Tudor book (1525), which, though not dissimilar in its nature from Skelton and Scogin and the German _Eulenspiegel_, varies distinctly from them all in being a history in doggerel rhyme, composed by one of the dupes of a licentious and unprincipled adventuress, named Edith, whose stratagems and impostures are rehearsed in this quaint metrical record with graphic minuteness. The date of the tract--the first quarter of the sixteenth century--its popular tenor, and its uniqueness of type, may together do something to disarm our anger at its literary poverty and its occasional latitude,--although, were not a lady in the question, it is not so offensive as the low buffoonery of Scogin, or as some of the items which found their way into the Tarlton volume.