Ferrers well comprehended the taste of his age when he conceived the
notion of a series of poems, in which famous kings and nobles should
describe in their own persons the frailty and instability of worldly
prosperity, even in those whom Fortune seems most highly to favour.
One of the most popular books of the preceding century had been
Lydgate's version of Boccaccio's poems on the calamities of
illustrious men, a vast monody in nine books, all harping on that
single chord of the universal mutability of fortune. Lydgate's _Fall
of Princes_ had, by the time that Mary ascended the throne, existed
in popular esteem for a hundred years. Its language and versification
were now so antiquated as to be obsolete; it was time that princes
should fall to a more modern measure.

The first edition of Baldwin and Ferrers' book went to press early
in 1555, but of this edition only one or two fragments exist. It was
"hindered by the Lord Chancellor that then was," Stephen Gardiner, and
was entirely suppressed. The leaf in the British Museum is closely
printed in double columns, and suggests that Baldwin and Ferrers meant
to make a huge volume of it. The death of Mary removed the embargo,
and before Elizabeth had been Queen for many months, the second (or
genuine first) edition of the _Myrroure for Magistrates_ made its
appearance, a thin quarto, charmingly printed in two kinds of type.
This contained twenty lives--Haslewood, the only critic who has
described this edition, says _nineteen_, but he overlooked Ferrers'
tale of "Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester"--and was the work, so Baldwin
tells us, of seven persons besides himself.

The first story in the book, a story which finally appears at p. 276
of the edition before us, recounts the "Fall of Robert Tresilian,