For expressive, happy simile, the two following examples are capital:-- "Yet sometimes riches is geuen by some chance To such as of good haue greatest aboundaunce. Likewise as streames unto the sea do glide. But on bare hills no water will abide. . . . . . . So smallest persons haue small rewarde alway But men of worship set in authoritie Must haue rewardes great after their degree."--ECLOGUE I. "And so such thinges which princes to thee geue To thee be as sure as water in a siue . . . . . . . So princes are wont with riches some to fede As we do our swine when we of larde haue nede We fede our hogges them after to deuour When they be fatted by costes and labour."--ECLOGUE I. The everlasting conceit of musical humanity is very truthfully hit off. "This is of singers the very propertie Alway they coueyt desired for to be And when their frendes would heare of their cunning Then are they neuer disposed for to sing, But if they begin desired of no man Then shewe they all and more then they can And neuer leaue they till men of them be wery, So in their conceyt their cunning they set by."--ECLOGUE II. Pithy sayings are numerous. Comparing citizens with countrymen, the countryman says:-- "Fortune to them is like a mother dere As a stepmother she doth to us appeare." Of money: "Coyne more than cunning exalteth every man." Of clothing: "It is not clothing can make a man be good Better is in ragges pure liuing innocent Than a soule defiled in sumptuous garment." It is as the graphic delineator of the life and condition of the country in his period that the chief interest of Barclay's writings, and especially of the "Ship of Fools," now lies. Nowhere so accessibly, so fully, and so truthfully will be found the state of Henry the Eighth's England set forth. Every line bears the character of truthfulness, written as it evidently is, in all the soberness of sadness, by one who had no occasion to exaggerate, whose only object and desire was, by massing together and describing faithfully the follies and abuses which were evident to all, to shame every class into some degree of moral reformation, and, in particular, to effect some amelioration of circumstances to the suffering poor.