The poem is a
bitter indictment of the utter corruption of all classes in the society
of his period. Like Juvenal, to whose school he belongs, he softens
nothing, tones down nothing. The evil is presented in all its native
hideousness. Lyndsay, on the other hand, would have been more vigorous
had he been less diffuse, and used the pruning-knife more unsparingly.
His finest satiric pictures often lose their point by verbosity and
tediousness. Brevity is the soul of satire as well as of wit.
The most vigorous English satire of this entire period was that which
we owe to the scurrilous pen of Skelton and the provocative personality
of Wolsey. With his work may be mentioned the rude and unpolished, yet
vigorous, piece bearing the rhyming title,
"Rede me and be nott wrothe,
For I saye no thing but trothe",
written by two English Observantine Franciscan friars, William Roy and
Jerome Barlowe;[6] a satire which stung the great cardinal so sharply
that he commissioned Hermann Rynck to buy up every available copy.
Alexander Barclay's imitation, in his _Ship of Fools_, of Sebastian
Brandt's _Narrenschiff_, was only remarkable for the novel satirical
device of the plan.
Bishop Latimer in his sermons is a vigorous satirist, particularly in
that discourse upon "The Ploughers" (1547). His fearlessness is very
conspicuous, and his attacks on the bishops who proved untrue to their
trust and allowed their dioceses to go to wreck and ruin, are outspoken
and trenchant:
"They that be lords will ill go to plough.
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