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The language of the stable and the kennel is rich in traces of Norman influence; and in backgammon, as played by orthodox players, we have a suggestive memorial of those Norman nobles, of whom Fortescue, in the 'De Laudibus' observes: "Neither had they delyght to hunt, and to exercise other sportes and pastimes, as dyce-play and the hand-ball, but in their own proper tongue."
The 'De Laudibus' was written in Latin; but for the convenience of readers not familiar with that classic tongue, the quotations from the treatise are given from Robert Mulcaster's English version.
The age of that writer was instinct with mental power: men were giants of intellect: Italy had soared to the highest pinnacle in the domain of mind, unequalled by preceding ages, except those of Pericles and Augustus: beginning in the fourteenth Century with Dante and Petrarch, and ending at the beginning of the sixteenth with the father of the modern political system, Machiavelli, it rose to the highest point of its altitude, and remained there through the whole of the fifteenth, when such bright lights shone constantly in the meridian of mind, as that Prince of the Church, Cardinal Sadoleti, great as a poet, equally great as a philosopher, whose poems on Curtius and the Curtian Lake and the Statue of Laocoon would have done honour to Virgil, while in his "De Laudibus Philosophiae" Cicero lives again in style and manner of thinking.
For the same excellent reason, the accusation of drunkenness ought not to have been brought against Homer: 'Laudibus arguitur vini vinosus Homerus.
Jeffreys and Macclesfield represent the unlettered Chancellors; More and Bacon the lettered. Fortescue's 'De Laudibus' is a book for every reader. To Chancellor Warham, Erasmus a scholar not given to distribute praise carelessly dedicated his 'St. Jerom, with cordial eulogy. Wolsey was a patron of letters.
Henry VI.'s Chief Justice of the King's Bench, Sir John Fortescue, in his delightful treatise 'De Laudibus Legum Angliæ, describes the ceremony attending the creation of a justice, and minutely sets forth the chief items of judicial costume in the Bench and Common Pleas during his time.
"Howbeit," runs Robert Mulcaster's rendering of the 'De Laudibus, "the habite of his rayment, hee shall from time to time forwarde, in some pointes change, but not in all the ensignments thereof.
"Te Deum Patrem colimus, Te laudibus prosequimur, Qui corpus cibo reficis, Coelesti mentem gratia." In the pauses Taffy heard, faint and far below, the noise of cowhorns blown by the street boys gathered at the foot of the tower and beyond the bridge.
Mary Magdalen, formerly on every May-day morning, at four o'clock, was sung a requiem for the soul of Henry VII., the reigning monarch at the time of its erection. The custom of chanting a hymn beginning with "Te Deum Patrem colimus, Te laudibus prosequimur," In the same place is still preserved, on the same morning of each year, at five o'clock.
The first sentence of the Ritus servandus in celebratione Missae in the Missal contains the clause "saltem Malutino cum Laudibus absoluto," The word saltem indicates that the Church notifies the minimum and expects a further hour, Prime or even others of the small hours, to be finished before Mass. It is entitled "A Neglected Adverb"; the adverb being saltem, from the clause quoted.
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