gates of St. Mary's Church; and Maurice Byrchenshaw, scholar in rhetoric, obtained the same honour provided he wrote the customary number of verses, and promised not to read Ovid's "Art of Love" to his pupils. On the 5th June, 1511, John Bulman graduated in rhetoric, and a wreath was placed on his head by the Chancellor of the University. Skelton was laureated at Oxford, and some years afterwards, viz. in 1493, he obtained public permission to wear his laurel at Cambridge, or as we now should term it, took an ad eundem there; thus Churchyard writing in 1568 says:
"Nay, Skelton wore the laurel wreath,
And past in schoels, ye knoe."
Whittington, a graduate in rhetoric, in his panegyric on Wolsey, says:
"Suscipe Lauricomi munuscula parva Roberti."
(Accept this slight tribute from Robert the Laureate.) Through the more general use of English, the Latin language gradually became an accomplishment rather than a medium of communication; and such degrees ceasing to be useful were no longer solicited or conferred. The last instance was in 1514, when one Thomas Thomson was laureated.
In the annals of the German Empire, we meet with several instances of poets being presented with a crown of laurel. Frederick III. conferred it on Conradus Celtes Protuccius, the first poet-laureate of Germany, who by a patent of Maximilian I. was made Superintendent or Rector of the College of Poetry and Rhetoric in Vienna, with power to bestow the laurel on approved candidates. The honour being purely civil, emanated solely from the supreme authority, and the power of conferring it was occasionally invested in Counts Palatine and others, as a
