JOHN, an old English poet, descended from an ancient Cumberland family, was born probably at Norfolk about the year 1460. Little is known of his life, and from the almost total want of the first editions of his poems, it is impossible to ascertain when it was he wrote the different pieces which have handed down his name to our time. He graduated at Cambridge probably in 1484, and seems subsequently to have proceeded to the sister university of Oxford. His lines on The Death of the Noble Prince Kyng Edward the Forth, who died in 1483, were probably among the earliest of his productions. In 1489 he wrote an elegy on the death of the Earl of Northumberland, who had been slain during a popular insurrection in Yorkshire. Skelton was admitted a laureate of Oxford and ad eundem at Cambridge, and he alludes with a self-satisfied vanity in many of his poems to the badge "enrolle with silke and golde, I dare be bolde thus for to were." The dignity in question, however, was merely a university degree in grammar, and not, as now, an honour conferred by the crown. He was probably also court-poet to Henry VIII., whom he had educated. It was in the latter capacity he had the ode dedicated to him by Erasmus, in which he alludes to Skelton as the lumen ac decus of British letters. He was immoderately vain, and exceedingly sarcastic, two gifts which kept him in constant broils. Of both qualities he has left but too strong evidence. No poet but Skelton has left some sixteen hundred lines in praise of himself. Yet the Garland of Laurell is by no means the worst of his poems. His attack on Cardinal Wolsey, who had formerly been his friend and patron, and who had more than once guided the exercise of his pen, as in Why come ye not to Courte? is, considering the time it was written, perhaps the boldest piece of vituperation in the language. Skelton sometimes surpasses even himself in the abundance of his sarcastic ideas, and the perfect torrent of abusive language which he pours upon the head of the offending cardinal. It is impossible to read Skelton's rude and bitter taunts against Barclay, or his onslaught against Garnesche, his ironical allusions to Gagin, or his angry lampoon on Lilly, without feeling that these writers were no match for him in rough banter or in keen invective.

Skelton had taken holy orders in 1498, and had been appointed rector of Diss in Norfolk, but how long he remained there does not appear. He was at least nominally rector of Diss on his decease. Anthony Wood affirms that he was esteemed fitter "for the stage than for the pew or pulpit;" and there can be little doubt, without giving credence to that obviously mythical collection known as the Merie Tales of Shelton, that the freedom of his observations, his occasional deflections into questionable by-paths, and the scorn which he flung so freely at all around him, and especially at the Dominicans, must have kept him in perpetual broils, and added greatly to the severity of their judgments of the satirist, and perhaps ultimately to his suspension from the church. The ostensible charge brought against the poet was that of keeping a concubine, by whom he had several children. The fact was, however, that Skelton had secretly married the woman, as he confessed on his deathbed, and was withheld only from making an open confession of his priestly crime by the terrors of his church. This affords us a glimpse of the ecclesiastical morality of those times, when it was accounted more respectable for a priest to cohabit with a woman than it was for him to marry her. It likewise shows us the free and unfettered thought of the poet, who could dare to think for himself in the midst of a whole kingdom, who accepted their faith without question, as they did the air they breathed. Besides those pieces already alluded to, he wrote likewise a drama entitled Magnificence; The Bouge of Court; Colyn Cloute; Ware the Hawk; Speke, Parrot; The Tunyng of Elynour Rumming; and Phyllip Sparowe, which Coleridge justly calls "an exquisite and original poem." Skelton is very severe on the Scotch, and on all enemies of Henry VIII. According to Caxton, he translated several of the Latin authors, but these versions have not come down to us. The poet took sanctuary at Westminster from the resentment of Cardinal Wolsey, where he was protected by his old friend Abbot Islip, till his death on the 21st of June 1529.

Skelton was emphatically a satirical poet. He tries various kinds of verse, serious, pathetic, and religious; but in none of them does he rise often above the dead-level of dulness and prosy solemnity. When he gets into his vein again, dulness finds no quarter. He flings, with an apparent carelessness, a rude sort of humour over his page that keeps a perpetual grin upon the countenance of the reader. He hesitates not about the employment of a vulgar word when it suits his purpose, and the thick macaronic doggrel that frequently bestrews his verse, renders his phraseology, which is almost always grotesque, as amusing as it is racy and pungent. There is, besides, a wild, airy, lawlessness about his Skeltonical verse, which, with its quick returning rhymes, the drollery of the words and phrases, and the general playfulness of the diction, renders it as rich a treat as a reader of this age can find. There is one remarkable feature in Skelton's poetry, namely, the lavishness and apparent carelessness with which he pours forth his endless treasure of words. (See The Poetical Works of John Skelton, with an account of his Life, by the Rev. Alexander Dyce, 2 vols., 1843.)