various dates, the first complete edition being appended, long after the
writer's death, to the _Ship of Fools_ of 1570.[86] They are there headed
'Certayne Egloges of Alexander Barclay Priest, Whereof the first three
conteyne the misereyes of Courtiers and Courtes of all princes in
generall, Gathered out of a booke named in Latin, Miseriae Curialium,
compiled by Eneas Silvius[87] Poet and Oratour.' This sufficiently
indicates what we are to expect of Barclay as of the Latin eclogists of
the previous century. The interlocutors in these three poems are Coridon,
a young shepherd anxious to seek his fortune at court, and the old Cornix,
for whom the great world has long lost its glamour. The fourth eclogue,
'treating of the behavour of Rich men against Poets,' is similarly 'taken
out of' Mantuan. In it Barclay is supposed to have directed a not very
individual but pretty lusty satire against Skelton.[88] He also
introduces, as recited by one of the characters, 'The description of the
Towre of vertue and honour, into which the noble Howarde contended to
enter by worthy actes of chivalry,' a stanzaic composition in honour of
Sir Edward Howard, who died in 1513. The fifth eclogue, 'of the
disputation of Citizens and men of the Countrey,' or the _Cytezen and
Uplondyshman_, as it was originally styled, again presents us with a
familiar theme treated in the conventional manner, and closes the series.
These poems are written in what would be decasyllabic couplets were they
reducible to metre--in other words, in the barbarous caesural jangle in
which many poets of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
imagined that they reproduced the music of Chaucer, and which, refashioned
however almost beyond recognition by a born metrist, we shall meet again
in the _Shepherd's Calender_. The following lines from the fifth eclogue
may serve to illustrate Barclay's style:

I shall not deny our payne and servitude,
I knowe that plowmen for the most part be rude,