Lord Campbell naturally suggests, that More’s fool ought to have been a great proficient at jesting, since he practised under so great a master. However this may be, when the Lord Chancellor had commenced to decline from power and dignity, he provided for the future well-being of his fool as carefully as he did for that of any greater officer of his household. Wolsey, at _his_ fall, sent Patch as an acceptable gift to the King. More made over Patteson to a less exalted sovereign,--the Lord Mayor of the City of London, “with a stipulation,” says Lord Campbell, “that he should continue to serve the office of fool to the Lord Mayor for the time being.” This rather loosely-worded phrase probably points at the origin of the office of “Lord Mayor’s Fool,” a title which was, however, given to the clubmen in provincial mayoral processions from the year 1444. Whether Patteson was, or was not, the original Lord Mayor’s Fool, by right of nomination to the office, he had as little respect for the dignity of chief magistrate of the city, as any modern merchant prince who, being too lazy or too unpatriotic to perform the onerous duty of the office, affects to despise the dignity which accompanies, and the titles which often follow, a distinguished fulfilment of that duty. So this first official corporation jester flouted his sublime chief. His humour in this respect is well hinted at by the authoress of ‘The Household of Sir Thomas More,’ who depicts Patteson as saying, on one first of April, “I told my Lord Mayor overnight, that if he looked for a fool this morning, he must look in the glass.... I should by rights wear the gold chain, and he the motley; and a proper fool he is, and I shall be glad when his year’s service to me is out. The worst of these Lord Mayors is, that we can’t part with them till their time’s up. Why, now, this present one hath not so much understanding as would foot an old stocking; ’twas but yesterday when, in quality of my Taster, he civilly enough makes over to me a half-eaten plate of gurnet, which I wave aside thus, saying,--I eat no fish of which I cannot affirm, ‘_rari sunt boni_,’ few are the bones, ... and I protest to you, he knew it not for fool’s Latin.” Patteson himself had a veneration for his old master which he could not entertain for the new, from whose chattering propensity at table, the jester picked out views of politics that foreboded evil to his former and now disgraced patron. “For the love of safety, then, Mistress Meg,” says Patteson, in a passage founded on this stray scrap of history, “bid thy good father e’en take a fool’s advice, and eat humble-pie betimes; for doubt not this proud madame (Anne Boleyn) to be as vindictive as Herodias, and one that, unless he appease her full early, will have his head set before her in a charger. I’ve said my say.” We may take Patteson at his last word, and, leaving him, proceed to greater names than his on the register of Motley in the service of kings.