The Marvellous Adventures and Rare Conceits of Master Tyll Owlglass. Robert Henderson Mackenzie Kenneth

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have infiltrated the country parts of England; and, if we regard the clowns of Shakspere, Touchstone, in “As You Like It,” for example, it might appear that Shakspere had seen this Black Letter of William Copland: yet, while the humour of Owlglass consists in his stolid performance of the exact words commanded him, there is clearly a quite other appreciation of wit in the English writer. It is, in fact, the polished foil beside the homely cudgel—both effective weapons, but one of them far more glittering, swift, and murderous. The cudgel may be warded off by a less skilful hand, the glancing steel hath made a wound, and been withdrawn in the very flash of its own rapidity. Dogberry and Verges, Costard perhaps, nay, even Sir Toby Belch, have points of character more resembling Owlglass than do the clowns of our great poet. The Fool in King Lear, has some kin to him, but is infinitely wiser. Indeed, we might perhaps rather class Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, humourists in their way, with Master Owlglass than the subtle wits Shakspere brings upon the stage. Yet has Owlglass an existence beyond and outside all question of contrast, all opinion of similarity. Gervinus, in his comprehensive History of German Fiction5 has well defined Owlglass to be “the personified quip and crank” (der personificirte Schwank). In fact, he is a Gothic Diogenes set in a Teutonic frame, living, moving, and having his being in an atmosphere as peculiarly distinct in its grotesque and massive proportions, as was the earlier Hellenic age, in its union of elegance and power. No previous time could have produced such an out-birth, and, with all our modern tendencies towards humour, fostered by the constant study of our quainter dramatists, another Owlglass would be a distortion, if not an impossibility.

      That, even in grave England, and with quaint Ben Jonson, Master Owlglass was a favourite, we may see from two allusions which he makes to him; one in the “Poetaster,” Act the Third, Scene the Fourth, where Tucca exclaims: “What, do you laugh, Owlglass?” And again in the “Masque of the Fortunate Isles,” produced in 1626, Ben Jonson introduces Howleglass; and Johphiel says to Merefool:—

      Or what do you think

      Of Howleglass instead of him?

      Merefool.—No him

      I have a mind to.

      Johphiel.—O, but Ulen-spiegle,

      Were such a name—but you shall have your longing.

      And later on, the remark is made:—

      Whether you would present him with an Hermes

      Or with an Howleglass?

      Skelton.—An Howleglass

      To come to pass

      On his father’s ass;

      There never was,

      By day, nor night,

      A finer sight,

      With feathers upright

      In his horned cap,

      And crooked shape,

      Much like an ape,

      With owl on fist.

      And glass at his wrist.6

      A most unjustifiable libel, by the way, is committed here, for Owlglass was always a “proper” gentleman, having no crook-back or ape-like appearance.7

      One of the most thoughtful and philosophic writers of our day, Mr. Carlyle, has a few noteworthy sentences regarding this strange book, which we shall do well to transfer to these pages:—

      “Lastly, in a third class, we find in full play that spirit of broad drollery, of rough saturnine humour, which the Germans claim as a special characteristic; among these, we must not omit to mention the Schiltbürger correspondent to our own Wise Men of Gotham; still less the far-famed Tyll Eulenspiegel (Tyll Owlglass), whose rogueries and waggeries belong in the fullest sense to this era.

      “This last is a true German work; for both the man, Tyll Eulenspiegel, and the book which is his history, were produced there. Nevertheless, Tyll’s fame has gone abroad into all lands; thus, the narrative of his exploits has been published in innumerable editions, even with all manner of learned glosses, and translated into Latin, English, French, Dutch, Polish; nay, in several languages, as in his own, an Eulenspiegelerei and Espiéglerie, or dog’s trick, so named after him, still by consent of lexicographers, keeps his memory alive. We may say, that to few mortals has it been granted to earn such a place in universal history as Tyll; for now, after five centuries, when Wallace’s birth-place is unknown even to the Scots; and the admirable Crichton still more rapidly is grown a shadow; and Edward Longshanks sleeps unregarded save by a few antiquarian English, Tyll’s native village is pointed out with pride to the traveller, and his tombstone, with a sculptured pun on his name,—namely, an Owl and a Glass,—still stands, or pretends to stand, at Möllen, near Lübeck, where, since 1350, his once nimble bones have been at rest. Tyll, in the calling he had chosen, naturally led a wandering life, as place after place became too hot for him; by which means he saw into many things with his own eyes; having been not only over all Westphalia and Saxony, but even in Poland, and as far as Rome. That in his old days, like other great men, he became an autobiographer, and in trustful winter evenings, not on paper, but on air, and to the laughter-lovers of Möllen, composed this work himself, is purely a hypothesis; certain only that it came forth originally in the dialect of this region, namely, the Platt-Deutsch; and was therefrom translated, probably about a century afterwards, into its present High German, as Lessing conjectures, by one Thomas Murner, who, on other grounds, is not unknown to antiquaries. For the rest, write it who might, the book is here, ‘abounding,’ as a wise critic remarks, ‘in inventive humour, in rough merriment, and broad drollery, not without a keen rugged shrewdness of insight; which properties must have made it irresistibly captivating to the popular sense; and with all its fantastic extravagancies, and roguish crotchets, in many points instructive.’”8

      Mr. Carlyle then cites one adventure, that of the Easter Play, which has not been included in the present version; for although it illustrates well enough the interior of a parson’s household of the fourteenth century, there is a smack of profanity about it which it is well to avoid. And, indeed, it is due to the reader of this volume, to inform him, that our present chronicle differs in one material point from all former editions. While it has been my object everywhere to tell the story of Owlglass in a quaint and simple manner, modern good taste required a special duty at the chronicler’s hands: viz., that of purification and modification, for it may readily be believed that a book written of the fourteenth century, for the sixteenth century, would abound with homely wit, not quite consonant with the ideas of the nineteenth. Therefore several stories of a somewhat indelicate, and generally pointless, character have been omitted, and their place supplied with matter obtained by a collation of several editions in the German, French, and Flemish languages.

      And another aim which I have had in view has been, where good taste and opportunity admitted, to apply, in a veiled manner, the axioms and quips of our knight-errant of roguery, to subjects and follies not banished from our own more polite age. The reader will thus be able to judge in how far this modern Owlglass differs from its predecessors. In no instance, however, have I permitted myself to lose sight of the object in view, which was to give as good a picture of the original as might be, and that in spirit rather than in letter. This spirit has been so justly estimated by M. Robin, a clever and dashing French critic, whose sad death may still be remembered by a few, that, at the risk of adding too much to this preface, I subjoin an epitome of his remarks:—

      “It is quite true,” says he, “that glory is nothing but vanity. I have seen in the sepulchral silence of libraries, names quite unknown, on the backs of gigantic volumes, the librarians could tell me nothing of these, except that they were the authors of these books. I have seen, on the pavement of ancient churches, pompous epitaphs, and heraldic arms, and the nails of the peasant’s shoe tread them under foot. Be then in life a man of learning, knowing every language, be a noble of Spain, a Knight of the Golden Fleece, Viceroy of Mexico or Peru, say you have the right of keeping

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