"A Christian and Merry Talk, that it is more pleasing to God and more wholesome for men to come out of the monasteries and to marry, than to tarry therein and to burn; which talk is not with human folly and the false teachings thereof, but is founded alone in the holy, divine, biblical, and evangelical Scripture" (1524).

"A Pleasant Dialogue of a Peasant with a Monk that he should cast his Cowl from him.

Merry and fair to read" (1525).
The above is only a selection taken haphazard from the mass of fugitive literature which the early years of the Reformation brought forth.

In spite of a certain rough but not unattractive directness of diction, a prolonged reading of them is very tedious, as will have been sufficiently seen from the extracts we have given.

Their humour is of a particularly juvenile and obvious character, and consists almost entirely in the childish device of clothing the personages with ridiculous but non-essential attributes, or in placing them in grotesque but pointless situations.