It is exceedingly likely that the court of the susceptible and profligate Edward IV., to which Scogin is supposed to have resorted, was a scene of coarse simplicity and no model of decorum; and so late down as the reign of George II. the great ladies permitted themselves a licence in speech, which prevented the editor of _Maloniana_ from printing the whole of the MS. But so far as the latter circumstance goes, these were mostly passages _inter se_ (so to speak); and it remains incredible, that some of the adventures with which Scogin is reported to have met within the very precincts of the palace, can have actually happened under the eyes of the queen and her attendants. Dr. Borde, I apprehend in fact, has committed the impropriety of transferring to another age the manners of his own, which was so far venial enough, and consonant with dramatic usage; but he has most unwarrantably taken some of his characters from a sphere of life in which the enactment of such low pranks would hardly have been suffered. To cast aspersions on the representatives of an extinct dynasty, however, was a tolerably safe game. _The Jests of Scogin_ had no political significance; and the occasional reflections on the clergy were not calculated to give serious offence in influential quarters, or to Henry VIII. himself, just at the juncture when the Reformation was imminent. Not in the pages of Borde alone, but throughout the literature of the later part of Henry’s reign, sly strokes at the doomed papal hierarchy were eyed with evident indulgence and favour. Borde knew his ground and his customers: had his satire been levelled at the Government in an infinitely milder and more covert way, the stake or the block would have been his portion; had his book been published twenty years sooner, his strictures on the Church would scarcely have been prudent; but he confined his pen, where he rose above a humble social level, to names which were little more than historical, and to an institution whose days were numbered. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER III. LITERATURE AND THE DRAMA AS CONTRIBUTORIES TO JOCULAR LITERATURE--DEPENDENCE ON SURROUNDINGS AND CIRCUMSTANCES.