That is hardly saide man, by the roode of rest.
I graunt it is harde, but to say truth is best, But yet shall I proue my saying veritable, Aduert my wordes, see if I be culpable. Unto our purpose: by diuers wayes three Men may be fooles, I shall them count to thee: They all be fooles which set their thought and minde That thing for to seke which they shall neuer finde. And they be fooles which seke thing with delite, Which if they finde is harm and no profite; And he is a foole, a sotte, and a geke also, Which choseth a place unto the same to go, And where diuers wayes lead thither directly He choseth the worst and most of ieopardie: As if diuers wayes laye unto Islington, To Stow on the Wold, Quaueneth or Trompington, To Douer, Durham, to Barwike or Exeter, To Grantham, Totnes, Bristow, or good Manchester, To Roan, Paris, to Lions or Floraunce.
What ho man abide, what already in Fraunce. Lo, a fayre journey, and shortly ended to, With all these townes what thing have we to do?
By God man knowe thou that I haue had to do In all these townes and yet in many mo, To see the worlde in youth me thought was best, And after in age to geue my selfe to rest.
Thou might haue brought one and set by our village.
What man I might not for lacke of cariage. To cary mine owne selfe was all that euer I might, And sometime for ease my sachell made I light.
To our first matter we better must entende, Els in twelue monthes we scant shall make an ende.
This passage has not escaped the notice either of Mr. T. H. Jamieson, who has edited Barclay’s translation of the “Stultifera Navis,” or of Dr. A. W. Ward, who has written his life in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” and puts the query that Godmanchester may be meant. The eclogue from which the quotation is taken, together with two others, are said to be “gathered out of a booke named in Latin, ‘Miseriæ Curialium,’ compiled by Æneas Silvius, Poet and Oratour.” This, of course, means that member of the Piccolomini family, who, after an earlier life not free from reproach, made a decorous pontiff, as Pope Pius II., and died in 1464. This book, drawn from his own experience of the unhappy life of courtiers, was the most popular of all his writings. It was often reprinted, but whether Barclay worked from a printed or a MS. copy is not known. Now, what his principles of translation were we know, both from his declaration and practice. In his version of Brandt’s “Ship of Fools,” he tells how he added and omitted as seemed best for his purpose of producing a book that should aid in strengthening the morality of the time. And in dealing with Æneas Sylvius, he has been even freer than in dealing with Brandt. Of the “Miseriæ Curialium,” there are several editions in the British Museum, and those of Paris (1475?), Cologne (1468?), Rome (1485? and 1578), have been examined for me by Dr. W. A. Shaw, to whom my best thanks are due for his kindness. “The book,” he says, “of Æneas Sylvius is in prose, and, in epistolary form addressed to ‘dñō Johī de Arch Pspicaci et claro Jurū cōsulto.’ There is none of the eclogue and dialogue form of Barclay’s work; there are no interlocutors, and there are no references, save to such names of classical antiquity as serve for satirical notice, in, say, Juvenal, with the exception that, in the section treating of the table and pleasures of eating, he refers briefly to the place of origin of the better known delicacies. There is no mention of Manchester, nor of England, from first to last, nor any possibility of it from the style of the letter, and taking it casually, side by side with Barclay, I cannot find a parallel point which would suggest a translation.”