The Epitaffe of the moste noble and valyaunt Jaspar late Duke of Beddeforde 388 Elegy on King Henry the Seventh 399 _Vox populi, vox Dei_ 400 The Image of Ipocrysy 413 CORRIGENDA AND ADDENDA 449 INDEX TO THE NOTES 457 SOME ACCOUNT OF SKELTON AND HIS WRITINGS. John Skelton[15] is generally said to have been descended from the Skeltons of Cumberland;[16] but there is some reason to believe that Norfolk was his native county. The time of his birth, which is left to conjecture, cannot well be carried back to an earlier year than 1460. The statement of his biographers, that he was educated at Oxford,[17] I am not prepared to contradict: but if he studied there, it was at least after he had gone through an academical course at the sister university; for he has himself expressly declared, “Alma parens O Cantabrigensis, ... ...tibi quondam carus alumnus eram;” adding in a marginal note, “Cantabrigia Skeltonidi laureato primam mammam eruditionis pientissime propinavit.”[18] Hence it is probable that the poet was the “one Scheklton,” who, according to Cole, became M.A. at Cambridge in 1484.[19] Of almost all Skelton’s writings which have descended to our times, the first editions[20] have perished; and it is impossible to determine either at what period he commenced his career as a poet, or at what dates his various pieces were originally printed. That he was the author of many compositions which are no longer extant, we learn from the pompous enumeration of their titles in the _Garlande of Laurell_[21]. The lines _Of the death of the noble prince, ynge Edwarde the forth_[22], who deceased in 1483, were probably among his earliest attempts in verse. In 1489 Skelton produced an elegy _Vpon the doulourus dethe and muche lamentable chaunce of the most honorable Erle of Northumberlande_,[23] who was slain during a popular insurrection in Yorkshire. His son Henry Algernon Percy, the fifth earl, who is there mentioned as the “yonge lyon, but tender yet of age,”[24] appears to have afterwards extended his patronage to the poet:[25] at a time when persons of the highest rank were in general grossly illiterate, this nobleman was both a lover and a liberal encourager of letters.