e 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. It is no meet office for
them. It is not seeming for their state. Thus came up lording
loiterers; Thus crept in unprechinge prelates, and so have they
long continued. For how many unlearned prelates have we now at this
day? And no marvel; For if the ploughmen that now be, were made
lordes, they would clean give over ploughing, they would leave of
theyr labour and fall to lording outright and let the plough
stand. For ever since the Prelates were made lords and nobles, the
plough standeth, there is no work done, the people starve. They
hawke, they hunte, they carde, they dyce, they pastime in their
prelacies with galaunt gentlemen, with their dauncing minions, and
with their freshe companions, so that ploughing is set aside."[7]

But after Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_ was published, which professed to
hold a mirror or "steel glass" up to the vices of the age, we reach
that wonderful outburst of satiric, epigrammatic, and humorous
composition which was one of the characteristics, and certainly not the
least important, of the Elizabethan epoch. Lodge's _Fig for Momus_
(1593) contains certain satires which rank with Gascoigne's work as the
earliest compositions of that type belonging to the period. That they
were of no mean reputation in their own day is evident from the
testimony of Meres,[8] who says, "As Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal,
Persius, and Lucullus are the best for satire among the Latins, so with
us, in the same faculty, these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall
of Emanuel College, Cambridge, the author of _Pygmalion's Image and
Certain Satires_[9] and the author of _Skialethea_". This contemporary
opinion