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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/englishversebetw01hamm 7 Pes ; po ¥ net: , ae | s 1 Zs , a fi. 195 itt nf a he 7 z 4 fs4 7 7 i f 7 5 p | ly fod ‘ mau wa, neuer { laa h ‘| Dither at Nay bk ory PUR LICATION S ENGLISH VERSE BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SURREY English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey Being Examples of Conventional Secular Poetry, exclusive of Romance, Ballad, Lyric, and Drama, in the Period from Henry the Fourth to Henry the Eighth EDITED WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES BY ELEANOR PRESCOTT HAMMOND, Ph.D. To know, Rather consists in opening out a way, Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without. — Browning, Paracelsus i: 733-37 76210 DURHAM : NORTH CAROLINA DUKESUNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1927, COPYRIGHT 192'7 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS THE SEEMAN PRESS DURHAM, N.C. To ARTHUR SAMPSON NAPIER Late Merton Professor of the English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford ¢ SCHOLAR « MASTER ¢ FRIEND e G&EQID ¥ 2), 208 ri/t ¢/>7 =a Denwer 6.2 5 ut. PREFACE This volume is intended primarily for the advanced student of English literary history ; and such intention has influenced both its plan and its mode of presenta- tion. No single volume can fully represent the productivity of the century-and-a- half between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Spenser, and can also offer the necessary comment upon the published texts. For barren as is the period in one sense, it is nevertheless enormously prolific, and the aspects of its expres- sion too varied for treatment in any compact anthology. The ballad and the religious drama, both of which lie partly within this tract of time, have been abun- dantly studied ; investigation of non-dramatic religious poetry is well under way; the romances have their share of attention; but the field of what I may call for convenience “formal” verse, the mass of secular production partly narrative, partly didactic, partly satiric, partly amatory, partly descriptive, verse adhering anxiously to standardized forms and stylistic devices, is still nearly untouched. It is in this field that the soil of English literature most obviously becomes ex- hausted during the fifteenth century; and the study of these works may seem to the casual observer a thankless task. Yet without such a study the survey of English literary history is arbitrarily scanted; and every worker who views litera- ture not as belles-lettres but as the expression of the national mind realizes that the functioning of that mind, like the movements of the racehorse or the boxer, is most clearly to be observed when the film is slowed. Elton has said that “the passage from older themes and styles into newer is best seen in the writers of mid- dle rank and mixed performance” ; and in this “Transition,” of all periods in our literature, that possibility of analysis is present. The rockbottom qualities which affect the currents of literature are visible not at triumphant flood but at ebb- tide. The “Transition” has much to teach the student as to the working of psychic factors and the influence of the social environment on poetic expression; more- over, principles drawn thence are valid even among the greatest. After observing the excess of standardization in Lydgate or in Hawes, we regard the lessening in Spenser, the still more marked lessening in Shakespeare, not so much as a miracle but rather as a return to the balance long prevented by formalism. Even with this limitation, it is impossible in a single volume to cover the field. In making a choice, the editor has endeavored to illustrate the different degrees of conservatism, the admixture now of satire, now of description, now of autobiography or of the personal, in the progress towards free treatment of the individual. A mass of verse at the close of the period is excluded because of its non-formal character. Copland’s two poems, Cocke Lorel’s Bote, Colyn Blowbole’s Testament, etc., would greatly enlarge our picture of the national mind, but they are outside the scope of this volume. Much has also been omitted from considerations of expense; the Flower and the Leaf should be here, as representing a motif highly favored by the courtly poetry of the time, but it is accessible in a modern text, and has accordingly been withdrawn from this anthol- [ vii ] Vill ENGLISH VERSE ogy. Gower is untouched here for the same reason. But a good deal of the con- tents of this volume is unobtainable by the student. Walton’s Boethius, Lydgate’s Dance Macabre; the translations of Orléans, Nevill, the Visions of Cavendish, and other poems, are accessible only in expensive editions if at all. And not only these poems, but most or all of those here printed are selected as illus- trating dominant motifs of the time:—the anxious curiosity about death, the Fortune-formula, the laments over extravagance, the eagerness about trade and travel, the paraded encyclopedic knowledge, the bourgeois contempt for women and the cavalier deference for women, the rising interest in the scamp, the sub- servience to patrons, the lip-respect for Chaucer. In several poems either the in- fluence of Chaucer is visible or a passage of Chaucer is illuminated, as in Bycorne and Chichevache, Canace’s letter, Walton’s Boethius, etc. Wherever possible, the texts are printed as wholes or as portions complete in themselves. We might do as did Charles Lamb for the Elizabethan drama- tists,—select passages showing the pictorial and emotional powers of their writ- ers; but if in displaying the versifier’s control over situation we conceal his ability, or inability, to get from situation to situation, we disguise facts neces- sary for the student, and cast a false light upon our period. It is incumbent upon the literary historian or editor to lay before workers proof how didactic was the fifteenth century at the emotional moment, how clumsy in managing tran- sition, how crude in motiving action, how unable to release the subject in hand. Only from such a body of facts can we observe the irregular growth of English constructive power ; and only long continuous excerpts, if not wholes, can provide a basis for observation. Even carelessly edited texts, like those put forth by Ritson and by Halliwell, retain their place with scholars just because they make wholes available for study. But it has been impossible, however desirable, to place the whole of each of these texts before the student. Lydgate’s Dance Macabre can be, and is, re- produced complete; the 36,000 lines of his Fall of Princes must necessarily be illustrated by extracts; nor can we refuse to make such excerpts, because a theme so important in West-European literature, a work so influential on the Continent and in England, cannot be omitted from our survey. The Garland of Laurell is printed entire; but portions only are possible of Hawes’ Pastime, of Cavendish’s Visions, of Barclay’s Ship of Fools. Yet in all these cases the editor has en- deavored to give chapters in full, to illustrate the mode of connecting chapters, to show the movement of the author’s mind among his material. The great amount of space given to Lydgate may provoke question; but since it is our problem to study the formal expression of the age, no apology is needed. For in this one man are represented so many of the aspects of such verse in the first half of the century that its standardized expression can al- most be studied from him alone. Criticism will also be aroused by my refusal to treat most of this verse as rhythmical composition. The work of Lydgate, for instance, has been taken very seriously by specialists; and only the inaccessibility of texts has prevented more of the verse of the period from receiving careful analysis on the model PREFACE ix set up by German scholars. To such treatment I am for two reasons opposed. First, because the method is itself inadequate, a handling of verse line by line only and according to the number of syllables; secondly, because analysis is wasted upon a large portion of this verse, which is, e.g. in the Libel of English Policy, in Ripley’s Compend, in Hawes’ Pastime, sheer doggerel, guiltless of rhythm and con- scious only of an approaching rime. This latter condition does not arise because of the badness of texts, for in the cases of both Hardyng and Cavendish we have the author’s own manuscript, and yet the rhythm is as awkward as any of the period We can indeed study the attempts of Lydgate and Hoccleve to use Chaucer’s pen- tameter line-flow, and we can recognize with pleasure the rhythmic command of the Orléans or of the Palladius-translator and of the writer of the Lover’s Mass. But in most of this transitional work we have to note that a failure of sense-per- ception, a stale formality of simile and of phrase, accompanies this rhythmic pov- erty as its shadow,—or its substance. The cramping of the spirit by an environ- ment which it cannot conquer through observation is at the basis of the Transition’s failure to express, or indeed of a similar failure in any age. Given a partially- educated and insensitive group, obedient to external conditions, eager for moral and intellectual credit, and if it attempts expression, be it in the twentieth cen- tury or in the fifteenth, there will appear the same respect for the didactic, the same penchant for allegory, the same imitativeness and use of formulae, and the same failure to feel rhythm. The textual presentation is academic. The original manuscript or printed copy is followed without deviation except in a few cases where the student might be led astray; in such cases the inserted or altered word is bracketed and the actual reading given at the foot of the page. All other changes, now sug- gested or made by previous editors, are relegated to the Notes. Modern punc- tuation has not been introduced; the markings of the original are scrupulously retained. For while the page may thus lose in clarity for the general reader, it gains greatly for the student, who is then given his proper share in the editorial problem of following the medieval mind. And when examining sentence-structure thus, the worker learns far more than when accepting uncritically the conclusions of an editor. Not only can an editor, even the best of editors, hypnotize his readers into false notions of the author’s meaning, but the whole subject of Early English punctuation has been slighted and obscured because of such ac- ceptance, continued century after century. We have made it impossible to obtain information on medieval theories of pointing by refusing to print texts with their pointing undisturbed; and the reasons for our refusal are the same as those once considered valid against the reproduction of the early spelling——a matter long since settled. On all these accounts, the present editor has declined to impose modern punctuation here. It will also be noted that the texts are not “critical”. The establishment of a critical text, deduced from comparison of all existing copies of the work, suffers, and must always suffer, under two limitations. The surviving copies may be far indeed from the fittest; and in any case, the text constructed from them, though presumably antedating them, is not conclusively the original. It x ENGLISH VERSE is “X”; but the identity of X with Chaucer or with Lydgate or with another cannot be asserted. Hence the labor of constructing such an hypothetical “Ur- text”, although an admirable exercise in acumen, arrives nowhither unless the number of copies be large and clearly grouped, unless moreover they be for the most part honestly executed. The present editor feels that the principle of critical text-construction is not something to be invoked “semper, ubique, et ab omnibus”, but is to be applied according to mass and character of material. Some of the texts here assembled exist in but a single copy; of some we have a copy in the author’s own hand; several are poorly preserved; and the few which survive in a number of copies, like Walton’s Boethius, have received a treatment uniform with the others; that is, one text is printed verbatim et literatim, with mention of variants in the Notes. In nearly every case the copies have been made by the editor. For the Palladius-text the photograph of the Wentworth Wodehouse MS was used by a Bodleian copyist; the Hoccleve texts have been revised by the Keeper of Manu- scripts at the Henry E. Huntington Library, California, where the codices formerly Phillipps 8151 and Ashburnham Appendix cxxxiii now are. In this latter case errors in the Early English Text Society’s edition have thus been removed. The number of authors here represented has made it impossible to approach each text as would a specialist in that subject. No one of these introductions is, or attempts to be, exhaustive; no biography is fully given, no debatable point re- argued. The separate bibliographies are more complete, although the titles are condensed, and minor points left to the Dictionary of National Biography or to monumental editions like that of Skelton by Dyce. Similarly, in the glossary, it is assumed that the student has the New English Dictionary at hand, is fa- miliar with Chaucer, and has a working knowledge of Early English otherwise. Etymologies are not given, nor dialectal peculiarities discussed. I am indebted to the Press of Duke University, and especially to its editor-in- chief, Dr. Paull F. Baum, for the care and patience, the interested craftsmanship and scholarship, which they have devoted to this volume. E. Pst TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE GENERAL INTRODUCTION The Two Periods of the “Transition’—The Struggle for Equilibrium in Each— The State of the West European Nations at the Close of the Fourteenth Century— The Rise of the Bourgeoisie—Chaucer and the Contending Forces—English Libra- ries and English Education at the Opening of the Fifteenth Century—Translation and Patronage—Song—The Sense of Rhythm—Rhythm in Chaucer and the English Chaucerians—Verse-Forms—The Scottish Chaucerians—Vocabulary—Narrative- Forms: Fabliau, Saint’s Legend, Allegory, Romance—Sensuous Perception— Prose—The Approach of Equilibrium Joun Watton: his Life and Work. The translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae A. Preface, Prologue, metre 1, prose 1 2 5 B. Book ii, metre 5, The Former aoe C. Book ii, metre 7 D. Book iii, metre 12, Orpheus j E. Preface to books iv and v; book iv, prose ‘t metre 1 Tuomas Hoccteve: his Life and Work La Male Régle . To Somer To Carpenter . Three Roundels The Dialogue with a Biriend: eae In Praise of Chaucer, from The Regement of Bringes To Bedford Joun Lypcate: his Life and Work The Churl and the Bird Horns Away Bycorne and Ghieherscies j Prologue to the Siege of Thebes . The Dance Macabre : ; The French text Epithalamium for Gloucester Letter to Gloucester : ‘ The Fall of Princes: Introduction . General Prologue . Letter of Canace to Macarets, front book i Rome, Remember, final envoy to book ii Thanks to Gloucester, from prologue to book iii . The Tragedy of Caesar, book vi Octavian’s Revenge, book vi The Tragedy of Cicero, book vi . The Tragedy of Boethius, book viii . Extract from the Epilogue, book ix ADO OO > [ xi] vii 102 110 113 118 124 426 142 149 150 157 164 169 174 176 179 180 185 186 xii CONTENTS BENEDICT BURGH Letter to John Lydgate . JoHN SHIRLEY Two Verse Tables of Contents ANONYMOUS A Reproof to Lydgate ANONYMOUS A translation of Palladius on Husbandry The Prologue . : : : ; A, B, C, D, Epilogue-Stanzas ANONYMOUS The Lover’s Mass ANONYMOUS Translations from Charles d’Orléans, with the French Joun HarpyNnc From the Chronicle: Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt ANONYMOUS London Lickpenny . ANONYMOUS The Libel of English Policy, lines 1-563 GEORGE RIPLEY The Compend of Alchemy: Preface and Prohibicio ANONYMOUS The Court of Sapience: extracts and summary STEPHEN Hawes The Pastime of Pleasure: extracts and summary Wittram NEvILL AND Ropert COPLAND Dialogue between Nevill and Copland The Castell of Pleasure: extracts and summary ALEXANDER BARCLAY The Ship of Fools: extracts . 3 The Prologue to the Eclogues ; Eclogue i iv JoHN SKELTON The Garland of Laurell GEORGE CAVENDISH The Metrical Visions: extracts Henry, Lorp Morey Translation of Petrarch’s Triumph of Love, book i A “Sonnet” on the Psalms ; ‘ : : NorTES List OF ABBREVIATIONS: SELECT REFERENCE LIstT SELECT GLOSSARY AND FINDING List 188 191 198 202 206 207 214 233 237 240 252 258 268 287 289 298 312 342 368 383 391 392 540 553 Page 51. Page 67. Page 75. Page 101, Page 154, Page 209, Page 216, Page 260. Page 398. Page 399. Page 400. Page 412. Page 421. Page 423. Page 451, Page 461, Page 543, Page 561, Page 585, ENGLISH VERSE BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SURREY ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS Line 105 belongs with preceding stanza. The first footnote belongs with line 8 of To Carpenter. In note on 2093, read lyf instead of lwf. line 5 from bottom, for Peachan read Peacham. line 7, for arblastic read arblastis. line 14 from bottom, for 1371 read 1372. line 19, for was run read was to run. Above text insert [Prologue to Book 1]. Delete the note on line 24. To note on lines 3-5 add: as in the Oxford 1911 edition. In note on line 22, for odde read odre. To note on line 28 add: or of Castalia on Parnassus. In the fourth line of note on 17-22, for later read earlier. In second line of note on 262, for To walk ungirt read To say that she walks ungirt. To note on line 427 add: See Curry’s Chaucer and Mediaeval Science, Oxford 1926, pp. 20 ff. line 3, for sulleness read sullenness. to line 4 below heading of Reproof to Lydgate add: see reproduction by Brusendorff facing p. 264. To matter of second paragraph ibid. add: The Chance of the Dice was pubd. by me in EnglStud. vol. 59. add: ExamVirtue. Hawes’ poem The Example of Virtue, for which see p. 271 here. under dede add asterisk to Thebes 58. under syngler add asterisk to FaPrin A 409. GENERAL INTRODUCTION The hundred and fifty years of the English “Transition” may fairly be treated in two periods, divided politically at the battle of Bosworth Field and intellectually at the establishment of printing. In the former of these periods, from 1400 to 1485, the Crown was long in dispute, the feudal nobility absorbed in foreign and in dynastic wars, the Church weakened by its dependence on the Crown, the commonalty engaged in using its first chance at accumulation of money. A shift of class-balance was in progress as result of the divisions and weakening of the landholders, of the economic power gained by the bourgeoisie ; and English society was profoundly unsettled because of this readjustment. In the latter period, from 1485 on, the Tudor despotism established itself above a crippled aristocracy and Church, with the tacit consent of a commonalty not yet politically coherent and conscious. The education of the bourgeoisie pro- ceeded slowly, taking at first a limited and pedagogic form, while courtly ex- pression retained in large part the formulae of an earlier age. Through the former period, ecclesiastical and chivalric standards of taste were still in force. Polite literature was formal, imitative, didactic; drama and the romance both submitted to pressure, and the traces of secular folk- expression outside the ballad are small. The numerous class of ecclesiastically- trained writers show the repressive, inhibiting power of the Church on letters; the Church contemned, as always, the human senses, contemned direct observation of any sort; it favored the symbol rather than the fact, and approved the didactic without any criticism of its quality. Its contribution to English literature was that of Christianity as a whole,—the idea of the struggle of vicious and virtuous impulses in the human heart,—an idea alien to the antique world. The Teutonic races obtained part of their intellectual discipline through the self-examination required by the Church; but the Church’s opinion of the human senses acted as an inhibition to any real study of man by man; it created as sharp a cleavage in the possible whole of mental development as existed between the adoration of the Virgin Mother and the monastic horror of woman. The medieval synthesis, both ecclesiastical and political, held firm while ' the Western world was still politically and linguistically a unit; it relaxed as the integration of separate nations and tongues progressed, a relaxation doubtless due in part to the difficulty of intercommunication over Western Europe. Upon this slow process another factor, the economic, acted as accelerant; with the use of coined money and the rise of an international banking system, democratic de- vices furthered by the aristocratic Crusades, the anti-synthetic particularistic tendency increased. As English commerce became more important, as the trad- ing towns grew, as the dealers in wool accumulated wealth, the English bour- geoisie rose in power. Human ambition and human self-assertiveness, long denied expression to the “demos” by the rigid frame of feudalism, found opportunity ; and during the Transition, especially during the second of its two periods, the [3] + ENGLISH VERSE bourgeoisie, vigorous, pushing, unscrupulous, with little education but with wide and widening human experience, comes more and more to the center of the stage. Like all natures of high animalism, no education, and unformulated ideas, the bourgeois was iconoclastic, insensitive, and greedy of emphasis; violent emotion- alism, coarse jest, attack on all forms of the established order, appealed to him as they appeal to the new “proletariat” public today. Even at his worst, however, he was undulled by machine-service and by machine-made noise; his nature at its best is seen in the work of his hands and in his impulse to song. As this confusion of tendencies, this strife between the overborne older order and the aggressive middle class, slowly worked to a height, it met incoming Hu- manism. A new cohesive force replaced the dissolving medieval theory. Every aspect of Humanism made for stability; a clarified expression, a standard of taste, a faith in man, were offered to a public sorely in need of them; and the concentration of interest upon the individual which characterized the Renaissance sweetened for the bourgeoisie the gift of Humanism which the Renaissance brought. It required time to train the new reading class; but as a small group of dramatic poets matured on the combined bourgeois and humanistic stimuli, the London public received the benefit in the theater, which taught through the emotions and the ear as well as the eye. To that conflict of good and evil in the human heart which was fundamental in Christian teaching, and to the human experience which the average man had acquired in the street and in the market- place there was now added the Renaissance feeling for form, the Renaissance conception of the humane and the beautiful. Ideals are again revered; and men’s imaginations, raised by such full faith in man as that of Spenser, are led to a newer and greater Romantic synthesis in Shakespeare, to a fusion not merely of human relations in a system, but of the seer with the thing seen. But in the years between Chaucer’s death and the Elizabethan florescence, before the middle class had taken form or received education, English literature was in the hands of the conservatives. Conservatism is as fundamental a force in literature and in character as is individualism, and as necessary. The greatest moments of artistic expression, whether in peoples or in the single workman, have been those of equipoise be- tween these two forces. Such moments are brief and rare; there is usually a predominance of one element, a predominance determined often by conditions other than literary. The rigidity of the structure of feudalism, denying expres- sion to all of lower rank, maintained the force of conservatism in literature for centuries. Had the English bourgeoisie obtained the upper hand in letters as well as in life, the chaos following on the shift might have been greater.. But the incoming power of Humanism, almost coincident with the definite emergence of the bourgeoisie, equalized the thrust of individualism; and we have in the Elizabethan age one of the world’s great moments of equipoise between the two contending forces. That it manifests itself in drama and in lyric is not sur- prising; for the agreement in spirit between the citizen community of Athens and the citizen community of Elizabethan London favored in both environments that drama which in each case had germinated within the limits of the established GENERAL INTRODUCTION 5 religion. In the outburst of individualism of our own day, accompanying the emergence of a new social class, we have an excess uncontrolled as yet by any conservative or humanistic force; and the unsettlement today of language and of morality, alongside the unsettlement and exaggeration of literary expression, are markedly parallel to the phenomena of the Transition. Each of these social reconstructions, reconstructions which are but attempts to reach a balance, is confronted by the problem of educating a public new to power, untrained and indocile. And the psychology of human beings in the mass, of the “crowd-mind,” is in each case an additional element in the struggle towards adjustment. The crowd-mind is self-assertive, but it is also self-pro- tective, an impulse which is evident especially in the tendency to imitation, to the preservation of a standard once accepted. No matter how strong the indi- vidualistic assertion may be, it has no sooner obtained a hearing than it hardens into a creed. A process of stereotyping, insisted upon by the group, follows close upon revolt, close upon each attainment of balance; and how long its pat- tern endures will depend in great part upon external conditions. If an ecclesi- astical and feudal framework is imposed upon society, as was the case all through the Middle Ages, literature will be standardized and held rigid by that framework. Should the inhibition be less heavy, as in fourteenth-century Eng- land, there may be here and there an attainment of balance, as in Chaucer, who represents in his isolated self the adjustment between group and individual, between book-education and human experience, between what George Eliot calls “separateness” and “communication.” It is rare indeed to find a piece of literature which has not been influenced by social pressures and inhibitions, but the effect of this potent factor on the course of a nation’s expression has not yet been studied. A view of English poetry which should regard it less as an evolu- tion than as a constant struggle of the spirit against successive group-inhibitions would be of interest; nowhere would there be more material than in the period at which we are looking. The society in which stereotypes prevail is one carefully and successfully guarded against change. It is not by chance that the two great modern social readjustments have each coincided with an expansion of the world in men’s minds. The period of sailing out upon the oceans, in the late fifteenth century, is matched in the late nineteenth by immensely increased facilities for land travel, and by the conquest of undersea and upper air yet later. Such extensions of the ordinary man’s horizon have incalculable consequences. They mean, of course, more human as well as more geographical knowledge; they mean increase of travel and commerce, exchange of ideas, enlargement of sympathies. But they bring difficulties as well as advantages. It is not that the laws of human nature, in- cluding the urge to imitate and to standardize, undergo any modification; but the speed and variability of their functioning increase enormously. In our own time the demolition of space-barriers which puts every variety of stimulus sim- ultaneously before the people, and the articulate assertiveness of all classes in a democratic society, have tangled the threads of tendency to a degree hitherto unimagined. The necessity for swift and constantly repeated adaptation, in a 6 ENGLISH VERSE society thus exposed to multifarious stimuli, is as disintegrating to personality as to literary standards. Beside the conditions of literature today, those of the fifteenth century are simplicity itself. In that last hour before the advent of printing and before the voyage of Columbus, the forces of established con- servatism could offer to a new type, literary or religious, a resistance denser and more general than any novelty today will encounter. Looking over the history of our literature, we see that what we call periods were much longer before the invention of printing, that they shortened as commercial intercourse was facili- tated, and that with cheap newspapers, steam, and the radio, the weakening of resistance to change has reached the danger point. The physical cause of this weakening is the immensely enhanced facility of human intercourse, which not only permits but compels a choice of stimuli at every moment, weakens the power of attention, and divides the individual against himself. The reduction in personality is as marked, in a hurried huddled age, as is the confusion of standards. The Transition, defended yet awhile by the forces of feudalism against an uneducated, even if rising, middle class, is, as I have said, a simple problem compared to that of our own day. The two Transition publics and the two modes of expression, with the hybrids between them, can be traced with comparative ease. One body of production, the conservative and stereotyped, perpetuates earlier themes and forms; it draws its support from the privileged classes and accepts the dictation of a patronage which knows only traditional types of ex- pression. As the years pass, the control of this patronage weakens, the force of imitation loses strength to resist increeping bourgeois qualities, and hybrids appear, as well as clumsy satire, jest, and description. This attempted description is for the most part of human or low-life figures, exaggerated often and often as overdone in another way as were the earlier stock-pattern figures. But poor and violent though the portraiture may be, it reaches out after real life; it at- tempts to use the senses, to redress the balance so long weighed towards the stereotype. And when this excess is in its turn reduced and steadied by Hu- manism, there is a brilliant though brief period of poise. It is with the first of these three phases, the formal literature of the Tran- sition, that we are concerned. The popular expression of the early sixteenth century is beyond our purview, as is the Renaissance. Yet though we em- phasize the stereotyping society of the earlier Transition as principal cause of its failure in literary vitality, we have not thus given all the reasons for that failure. Even though we add the isolation of England during the Hundred Years’ War, we have not fully explained her intellectual weakness then. The war indeed made itself felt on letters in the barrier which it set up between England and her nearest neighbors, in its denial of human intercommunication. If Mr. Belloc can say of Roman England that her separation from the Continent by barbarian Roman soldiers “lowered the general process of civilization in the eastern and starved into a still lower standard the isolated western part,” this was equally true of the sundering force of the French war in the fifteenth century. But neither that war nor the contest of the Roses is the sole cause of English literary GENERAL INTRODUCTION 7 conditions at the time. The tightening of inhibitions by the small arrogant litera- ture-producing class has its effect in weakening English poetry; the break-down of the aristocracy through war, the rise of the bourgeoisie through increase of fluid wealth, account for the unsettlement of standards and the coarsening of taste; the enforced separation from the Continent delays education. But none of these, nor all taken together, tell the full story of the English Transition. The “content” of any literary period varies in reality and power with the weight of conviction and enthusiasm behind it. Carlyle, discussing the age of Louis XV, remarked that “when the general life-element became so unspeakably phantasmal, it was difficult for any man to be real.” Morley says of Voltaire’s Henriade: “To form a long narrative of heroic adventure in animated, picturesque, above all in sincere verse, is an achievement reserved for men with a steadier glow, a firmer, simpler, more exuberant and more natural poetic feeling than was possible in that time of mean shifts, purposeless public action, and pitiful sacrifice of private self-respect.” And Santayana may also be quoted: “When chaos has penetrated into the moral being of nations, they can hardly be ex- pected to produce great men.” The new public of England was as uneducated morally and ethically as it was mentally. It brought to secular literature no high purpose, no faith in man, no sincerity; its narrow bourgeois greed, its measure- ment of life in terms of power and money, debarred it from giving out as a people any real inspiration. And the men to whom England had to look as her spokesmen were equally devoid of real inspiration; they were trained indeed to some extent, but Church-trained, set firmly in the clerical mould, and as scanted of liberal education as their public. Such writers had not either element of literature; neither they nor their readers felt high purpose, and they themselves possessed no craftsmanship. Milton’s “various style” and “holy rapture” were both lacking. There have been times in English literature when one of these elements has alone sufficed to keep a body of poetry stable. In the spiritually mea- ger age of Queen Anne, brilliancy of manipulation compensated in part for a lack of sincerity, and Pope stamped an alloy of mean intrinsic value to pass current for generations. But Lydgate, for example, had no such ability. And though without the one basis, spiritual or intellectual, a body of literature may stand, it cannot when devoid of both vital sincerity and technical excellence. The weakness of the fifteenth century is no marvel; what were marvellous were the growth of anything beautiful in verse under such conditions. We do not endeavor, as appears from the foregoing, to explain the fifteenth century as the outcome of the fourteenth. The doctrine of “continuous entity” has value, but a mass of people moves not on the lines of the physical organ- ism. The fifteenth century is not solely a degeneration nor an inheritance from the years before it; it is not solely a period of gestation for a coming birth. The Elizabethan Renaissance is less truly an upleap than an attainment of equilib- rium after long effort at balance, an equilibrium at last made possible by the break in social inhibitions, the advance in the new public’s education, the enlarged view of the world, and a more generous ideal of life. These are all conditions 8 ENGLISH VERSE external, in a sense, to literature; and it is now our problem to observe in more detail how such conditions formed in later medieval England. During the ten centuries before the discovery of America the slowly in- tegrating countries of Western Europe had developed on varying economic and political lines. The long sea-coasts of Italy and Britain, with their Oriental and Dutch frontages, had stimulated sea-borne trade. In Italy the growth of the tex- tile industry was closely connected with the rise of that trade, and the two fos- tered each other. England did little weaving until the mid-fourteenth century ; with her, minerals, and above all raw wool, were the export staples. This con- dition favored a large rural and a smaller trading class; and the habit of mind which is developed by artisan-skill was of late awakening in Britain. Her turn in the world’s manufacturing economy came with the utilization of her iron and her coal, when Italy’s primacy in textile work passed from her because of her lack of the minerals so abundant farther north. The political development of the two countries was also very different. Italy’s position on the Mediterranean Sea, the heart of ancient civilization, the seat of the Roman Empire and later of the Roman Church in her peninsula, the number and immediacy of her political contacts, the continuity of her intellectual life, made her widely different from insular, remote, untutored Britain. England’s political and mental history hardly began until she was drawn, by the Norman Conquest, into the circle of the growing nations. There she found Italy, France, and the Low Countries her far more experienced and matured sisters. Her mer- chant trade built up slowly, and for generations her intellectual dependence was directly or indirectly on France, her conqueror and teacher. It had been the great task of France to preserve the Latin tongue and to discipline the expression of Western Europe through her schools of philosophy and dialectic. Politically her position in the fourteenth century was midway between that of Italy and that of England. She was not split, as was Italy, into a half-hundred of jealous and contentious statelets, each torn also by local party strife; but her noble class was more numerous, compared with her bour- geoisie, than in England, owing to the social system which made every French younger son of aristocratic family also noble and privileged. The untaxed wealth of the Roman Church was much greater in France than in England; and after the division of territory among the sons of King John, the quarrels among the princes thus aggrandized and the Crown became violent. So far as letters and art were concerned, the rivalry between Burgundy, Anjou, Orléans, Berri, and the Ile de France stimulated the work of chroniclers, translators, painters, carvers, and scribes, even as was the case in the Italian peninsula among the rival despots. But the mass of the French people was heavily taxed, more so than in other countries, and lacked the political consciousness so swiftly developed in smaller and less agricultural states like Athens or Florence or Flanders. There was no check upon the dominant classes, and these continued in a round of imitation, so far as literature was concerned. Where the people could receive education, as in the handicrafts, art was vital; the architecture, the glass and metal work, the tapestry of the later Middle Ages, all bear wit- GENERAL INTRODUCTION 9 ness to this. But the exclusively aristocratic literature of France suffered from the sterility of the aristocracy and the Church. Communal development advanced faster in the small states north of France. The territory we now know as Holland and Belgium was in the fourteenth cen- tury divided into a group of thriving counties and duchies,—Brabant, Flanders, Hainault, Seeland, Holland, etc. The coast state of Flanders, in especial, was almost independent of the Empire, and her busy cities had grown rich by the manufacture of England’s wool. During the latter fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the French dukes of Burgundy came into possession, by marriage or by usurpation, of most of these little territories; and the marriage of Mary of Burgundy, sole heir of Charles the Bold, with Maximilian of Austria, carried the whole great Burgundian power to her grandson, the Emperor Charles the Fifth. The long years’ struggle of the gallant little states of the North with Charles’ son, Philip of Spain, is, however, no part of our history; at the period we are considering they were opulent manufacturing communities, famous for their glass, metal, and textile work, for their painters in oil, for their wealth, their growing political confidence and impatience of despotic control. Whatever their artificial dynastic bonds with France or with the Empire, the whole economic life of the Low Countries depended on England, from which they drew the wool for their weaving. And the connection of the two shores was other than commercial; the marriage of Edward III of England to Philippa of Hainault, and the constant intercourse between the English and the Burgundian courts in the next century, while Burgundy was supporting England against France, had almost as much influence on the arts and letters, the book-collecting and trans- lating of England, as the similarity in trade-interests had on the bourgeoisie of the two countries. It was from the French-speaking court of the Burgundian dukes that much of England’s fifteenth-century “culture” came; and it was from the court of a Burgundian duke and his English duchess that Caxton returned to London, carrying the Low-Country art of printing. England’s insular freedom from European political problems had left her, during the years since her royal house had become thoroughly English, in a position to grow more evenly and healthily than any Continental country. At the middle of the fourteenth century all signs were promising. In political, in literary, in social expression, she was full of vitality. The progress of Parliament towards control of government, the assertion of the nation against the Papacy in the statutes of Provisors and Premunire, the growing prosperity of English traders, the freer intercourse with the world, seemed to mean an awakened and intelligent group-consciousness. At that moment the Biblical drama, the bal- lads, the revival of the native verse, the rise of reforming feeling and of mystical thought, the technical power of Chaucer, all gave promise of a genuine literary florescence. Just then, it may be, if political class-agreements had continued the loosening of medieval inhibitions, if intercourse with the South of Europe had left the road open for intellectual growth, we might have had a noble na- tional expression. Instead, everything conspired to check the development which seemed so certain, and to set the stage for a very different drama. 10 ENGLISH VERSE First in the sequence of untoward events was the Black Death. How large a proportion of England’s population died in the series of epidemics which swept West Europe at intervals from 1348 on, we do not know; but it is clear that she lost so heavily from her working class that there was a sudden and a permanent shortage of labor, reflected by a rise in wages and in prices. The landowners, who largely constituted Parliament, refused to recognize the in- evitable; and that energy which had been expended by them on control of king and nobles was diverted to a class-struggle with labor. Ten years before the first great wave of the plague, also, the disastrous Hundred Years’ War with France had begun. ” A strong and ambitious sovereign might have turned this rupture between landholders and commonalty to his own advantage. But the later years of Edward III were weak; the folly of Richard II brought him to ruin; and affairs weltered in chaos while peasants and Lollards were contending with landlords and Church. In the early fifteenth century we find England with her throne occupied by the keen and determined Lancastrians, her Church freed from Lol- lard criticism and sunk into apathy, her peasantry beaten into sullen dejection, the inhibiting feudal framework clamped again upon her literary expression, and all trace of her intellectual vigor gone with the barring of the Channel, the death of Chaucer, the death of religious freedom, the death of national unity. All unknown to king and noblesse, however, there was building up with their sanction a power which should undermine their rule more completely than the labor unrest. Where public and private obligations could be reckoned and col- lected in money, the country availing itself of that convenience was moving towards a time when political relations would cease to depend upon tenure of land; in other words, the feudal system was about to fall before the power of the bourgeoisie. There was no protest in this case from landholders or from Church, for that payment in coin which became the basis of trading prosperity was a convenience recognized alike by crusading nobles, absentee landholders, and the tax-collectors of the Roman Church. On this new material foundation arose the bourgeoisie, in all its impulses antagonistic to the social order which had endeavored to hold it in check,—anti- feudal, anti-chivalric, anti-clerical, impatient, iconoclastic, ribald. Whatever the shortcomings of the falling order, it had nominally professed ideals,—loyalty to God, to the sovereign, to the beloved lady. But the rising bourgeoisie, during the long ensuing struggle with moribund feudalism, served no ideals; it had no apparent motive except self-aggrandizement. There was nothing in it of the respect for the past as a Golden Age, which chivalry had felt, nothing of the modern devotion to the future of the race, to the betterment of generations yet unborn. Its deficiency in enthusiasms, in convictions, in devotions, left it unen- dowed with literary force, as it was also undisciplined by training. The renewal of the Hundred Years’ War under Henry V was no struggle against a Persian invader, a Spanish invader. Its motive was frankly lust of dominion. In speaking of the effect of the Persian war on Greece, Bury has said that in that war was illustrated “the operation of a general law which governs human so- GENERAL INTRODUCTION 11 cieties. Pressure from without tends to produce unity within.” Fifteenth- century England, however, was not rising to defend herself; she was not even venturing, as did Tudor England, into undiscovered countries and uncharted seas. She was seeking to aggrandize herself at the expense of an equal, a neigh- bor, a sister. Whatever Henry V’s arguments of hereditary right, before his in- vasion of France in 1415, he appealed as much to the baser passions of the nation as did Bismarck. And the penalty which England paid was a spiritual one; she paid in the impoverishment of her literature, the deterioration of her Church, the delay of her emancipation and of her education. All that forming literary impulse which was just ready for the discipline of Humanism was stifled for many years. For not only did England’s intellectual resources, still limited be- cause of her belated admission to the European storehouse of thought, receive little or no food during most of the fifteenth century, but there was from decade to decade a steady loss in intellect and taste, caused by the ceaseless imitation, the starved inbreeding, of a race of ill-nurtured clerics. England in the fifteenth century, to quote Carlyle’s phrase, saw life as “a thing whereby to do day-labor and earn wages”; she saw literature as a means of “eschewing idleness”, in the current monkish phrase. And neither view ever inspired a soul to real utterance. Both fundamental elements of a national literature were thus lacking in fifteenth-century England, the pressure of generous popular feeling and the presence of the technical artist. The previous century had felt the stirrings of high emotions, and had uttered them, often awkwardly enough, through the bal- ladists, the mystics, Wyclif, Langland. One supreme artist, one man of both genius and technique, that century had possessed in Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer had certain essentials of artistic mastery as completely in his grasp as had the Greeks from whom he differed so widely. He knew the superiority of balance over symmetry; he understood and practiced restraint in expression; he studied contrast as no man but Shakespeare, in England, has studied it; he recognized the power of the selected detail; his senses were alert and keen. But neither these essentials nor his amazing technical mastery of his material could be com- municated, and his touch was too light and shrewd to guide his followers. In that technical mastery no comparison with his English predecessors is possible. His management of verse-flow, the vigor of his imagination, his per- fect acquaintanceship with the creatures of his art and his power of bringing his readers into their presence, his understanding of his audience, have no proto- type in England. We term such qualities “modern”; yet medieval Chaucer is as well. He used unhesitatingly and naturally many themes and forms which seem to us absurd; but by using this familiar material he kept himself understanded of the many, as Shakespeare did. In both of them was the “communication” with their fellows, and in both of them the “separateness” of genius. And in yet another way Chaucer was a composite. He worked often with an eye on the aristocratic patron, used often aristocratic themes; but more and more, as he grows older, is the power released in him bourgeois. His kinship is with Boccaccio, with the French fabliau-makers, with Chrétien de Troyes or Jean de Meun. Like them his perceptions are quick, shrewd, amused; like them 12 ENGLISH VERSE his study is by preference of human situation. Like them he excels in the smaller structural qualities; like them he makes little or no attempt to raise the pitch of life, as romance and allegory do, and as the bourgeois spirit never does. Yet simply and solely bourgeois, of the bourgeois ignorance of letters, the bourgeois-Philistine contempt for whatever it fails to understand, Chaucer was not. Always he is the composite, bourgeois enough to meet the bourgeoisie, courtly enough to meet the courtier, of genius sufficing to understand and to fuse both and to carry both into permanent literature. Bookman by taste and business man by profession; not deeply read but passionately addicted to reading; neither philosopher nor thinker, yet observer of everything human, interested in every- thing human, tolerant of everything human, without desire to teach or to preach; pliant to the literary customs of his time, yet understanding how to comply and to surpass with the same gesture,—Chaucer, like Shakespeare, struck a balance between individual assertion and conservative acceptance. The century after his death saw the bourgeois and the aristocratic tenden- cies, which he had united, fall apart. Of the two publics into which England then split, publics more clearly defined after the establishment of printing, it was the aristocratic and formal which paid Chaucer deference and strove to imitate him. The group of his acknowledged followers had before them the same material, human and literary, which had lain before him; but their handling of books and of life is entirely different from his. No English “Chaucerian” looks at the written page as Chaucer had looked at it; there is only one man in the next age who is steeped in a book as was Chaucer,—Henryson in his Fables. Henryson, in his capacity of schoolmaster, must have taught and retaught Aesop until the Fox and the Wolf and the Cadger rose before him in their habit as they lived. But Lydgate, to take the most prolific of Chaucer’s English admirers, has only a superficial contact with books, even with those he translates; he does not remember obvious facts about the Canterbury Tales, great as is the admira- tion he professes for it. His eye slides off the written page, slides off the human face; his senses are not alert, his interest not alive. No evidence is before us, and none may ever be obtainable, as to the actual condition of the human senses in any poetic period. But the appeal to them in “Romantic” periods is as marked as the lack of appeal to them when literature is held in stereotyped forms. It may be a fundamental fact in the Transition that its writers were so generally without visual and auditory sensitiveness. Description is abundant, but it moves in formulae; words are abundant, but the pregnant epithet, the revealing phrase, is not there. Chaucer was not one of the word-sensitive, as was Shakespeare or Keats; he cannot speak of “ardent marigolds” or of “warmed jewels”, but nevertheless his senses are not prisoners to formula. Whether it was Lydgate’s ecclesiastical habit of mind, or the pressure on him of translation done to order, or his own temperamental sluggishness, which dulled him, we do not know; but his attention, his perception, his expression, are always blunted and diffused. He had, however, more than many writers of his time, the access to books. The age was one of book-accumulation in England, as in Burgundy and in GENERAL INTRODUCTION 13 France. Henry VI laid the foundations of the immense Royal collection of man- uscripts now in the British Museum, and his uncle Humphrey of Gloucester presented his books to the University of Oxford. Balliol College, Oxford, re- ceived from her son William Grey, bishop of Ely, about two hundred volumes he had! collected, three-quarters of which are still there. John Tiptoft Earl of Worcester, also a Balliol man, purchased so many books south of the Alps that he was said to have despoiled Italy in order to enrich England. He too gave books to Oxford. And at Oxford, until the dissolution of the monasteries, was the great library formed by Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham (died in 1345), an ardent amateur of books, as his friend Petrarch describes him, and ?author of the Philobiblon. Outside Oxford, too, was ample book-supply, especially in the Benedictine monasteries; and no one of these was better stocked than Lydgate’s own house of Bury St. Edmunds. Nor were royalty and the monastic houses the only book-lovers in Eng- land. We have still to decipher and arrange the evidence afforded by coats of arms painted in the books of their owners, which may reconstruct in part for us the collections of the Percies, the Stanleys, the Sinclairs, etc. And from the bequests in wills we can sometimes trace the passing of precious volumes from Sir John Morton to the Countess of Westmoreland, sometimes the bequest of the Canterbury Tales or of “Bochas” by one plain English citizen to another. The fifteenth century in England was not poor in the number of books from which sustenance could be drawn. The vibrating body and the transmitting medium were there, as they had been in the fourteenth century; the difference was in the receiving ear. To the very verge of the age of Elizabeth there were English- men full of enthusiasm for study, full of enthusiasm for travel, acquiring books, translating ; but their efforts to express themselves can be classed as poetry only because of the accident of rime. Not all of Lord Morley’s interest in Petrarch can make his translations endurable; the five years which Osbern Bokenam spent in Italy in no wise mitigated the clumsiness of his utterance; and neither Agin- court nor his Italian travels inspired John Hardyng to one rhythmical or readable line. What Cardinal Newman called “a haziness of intellectual vision” came, in the fifteenth century, from the same cause which Newman specified for his own time,—the lack of a really good education. It was the speaker’s failure to see, to hear, to make fresh and independent comparisons, which deprived him of the power to understand or to express, which doomed his style to» weakness and muddlement. Any form of education which quickened the perceptions of the English patron and the English clerk, or which could refine the taste of the bourgeois, would have served late medieval England, and did ultimately reach it in the form of drama; but from the inherited routine of study no stimulus came. Higher education, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was obtainable in England at the monastic schools and universities and at the Inns of Court. Something more like a “finishing-school” training was to be found in great houses like that of John of Gaunt; a youth taken as page in such a household would become a complete courtier, able to speak and write French and a little Latin, 14 ENGLISH VERSE to touch the lute, and to gather as much more knowledge as he could draw from the foreign-born physician or astrologer or Latin secretary who was so frequently to be found in the entourage of a great noble. The university man was definitely a logician or theologian, trained to the shaping of rhetorical periods or to scholastic argument in Latin; he often divided his later years between the penning of Latin letters for diplomats and a Church post given him as reward for secretarial duty. The lawyer received a more humane education, and may have lived a fuller life. Sir John Fortescue’s classic account, although not particularized, tells us that in 1468-70, when he wrote, the training given by the Inns of Court included not only law and sacred and profane history, but singing, dancing, “and such other accomplishments as are usually practiced at Court.” If Chaucer were a member of the Inner Temple, as now seems possible, his education was neither that of the desultory courtier nor of the secretarial monk; he must have learned how to mix with men as well as how to read many books. No match for him in per- sonality came out of the Inns of Court in the fifteenth century; but whatever the determining power of Chaucer’s own genius on his growth, some part of the difference between him and Lydgate, for example, may be due to the sharpening and clarifying of the one mind, the dulling and relaxing of the other, by the mental discipline received in young manhood. The breaking-down of the difference between the two English publics, the beginnings of Humanism, are apparent first in the spread of secondary schools; and to this educational advance the new art of printing made early response. Caxton, with his strong personal interest in romantic narrative and his own ac- tivity as a translator, allied himself by preference with aristocratic patrons, with men of wealth. Only by such alliance, indeed, could he have published his am- bitious folios. He tells us in one of his invaluable prefaces (to the Golden Legend) that the Earl of Arundel, when ordering the work, had promised him a buck and a doe each year, and to take a “reasonable number of copies.” His issuance of Cicero’s De Senectute was at Sir John Fastolfe’s command; the Mirror of the World was printed for Hugh Brice, afterward Lord Mayor of London; and his earliest enterprise, the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, undertaken while he was yet in Flanders, was at the command of Margaret duchess of Burgundy. The French versions used by Caxton for this last and for the Cicero had themselves been executed for ducal patrons; no man, indeed, could devote himself to such undertakings without assurance of support; and much of the formal large-scale literary production of the fifteenth century depended upon the taste of wealthy men. Caxton’s successor, de Worde, was a more practical and less intellectual man than his master; under him and Richard Pynson the character of the London press changes, and reflects the state of the open market, the spread of education, the taste of the smaller customer. Gordon Duff states that of the ca.640 books printed by de Worde between 1500 and ?1535, over two hundred were school books. De Worde’s hundred and fifty or so of poems and romances, beside this textbook production, shows how definitely a new sort of patron had appeared. GENERAL INTRODUCTION 15 But whatever increase took place in the number of schools and of school- books, in the second half of our period, the mass of the English people was still little affected by education. It was not by book-experience that they learned, but by life-experience, by enlarged discourse and enlarged intercourse among men. For this the growth of trade, of travel, and of the towns was responsible. Not that there was any marked increase in the number of pilgrims to foreign shrines, or any clear effect on English culture caused by the travel of English gentlemen and scholars to Italy. It was the many smaller and less obvious factors which counted; not the spectacular arrival of Erasmus in 1497, not the sojourn of Poggio, so much as e.g. the settlement near Winchester of Italian workers in metal and plaster. It was not so much the presence in every great house of foreign secretaries, nor even the necessity for dealing with Flemish woolbuyers and Genoese moneylenders, as it was the extending of every citizen’s horizon by enlarged buying power, repeated journeys near home, safer roads, wider acquaintance, aroused curiosity. The freer circulation of money and the increase of trade as compared with agriculture pushed the key of bourgeois life nearer to that of the privileged classes, just as the Ford car and the highway system are pushing the change today. That change proceeded very slowly. Everything during the first half of our period combined to delay it; the distraction of England by class-quarrels, religious quarrels, dynastic quarrels, her cultural isolation by the French war, the lowering of her morale by that selfish and disastrous undertaking. With the founding of the Tudor despotism and the establishment of printing, the confusion nominally ends; but it is long indeed before the bourgeoisie becomes able either to express itself or to make itself felt in national affairs. And in the absence of any fresh creative impulse, the earlier formulae continue to endure. Long after the introduction of printing, the expression of the people is still scarcely heard; the upperclass code, with its didactics, its allegories, its translations, its verbal stereotypes, persists. However broken the aristocratic public politically, their taste regulates literary production. Of this aristocratic literature, translation forms a large part. At the open- ing of the century John Trevisa, the protégé of Lord Berkeley, made for his pa- tron prose translations of Bartholomaeus De Proprietatibus Rerum, of Higden’s Polychronicon, and of delle Colonne’s De Regimine Principum. The Polychroni- con was printed by Caxton in 1482, emended by the editor-printer because of its “rude and old Englysshe, that is to wete certayn wordes which in these dayes be neither vsyd ne understanden.”’ The De Regimine was one of Hoccleve’s sources for his verse Regement of Princes, dedicated to Henry V while Prince of Wales; and another of his sources, the Secreta Secretorum, so widely popular in the Middle Ages, was turned into English prose by James Young for the Earl of Ormonde about 1420, and into verse by Lydgate and a pupil a generation later. It was about 1410 that John Walton made his stanzaic translation of Boethius’ De Consolatione at the command of Lord Berkeley’s daughter. Another didactic work, de Guilleville’s three-part Pilgrimage, was turned into English several times before 1500, one verse-rendering of its second part being by Lydgate to the Earl 16 ENGLISH VERSE of Salisbury’s order. Much of Lydgate’s activity, indeed, was as translator. He went over into the romantic-epic field at the bidding of Henry V, with his Troy Book ; he may have pleasured himself with his Siege of Thebes, his Churl and Bird, his Dance Macabre; but his principal business was that of a large-scale didactic translator, from the saints’ lives done for Henry V and for Henry VI, for the Countess of March, for the Abbot of St. Albans, to his heaviest undertaking, the 36,000 lines of the Fall of Princes, executed for Humphrey of Gloucester. Didactics mingled with narrative we find in the saints’ legends of Bokenam, Bradshaw, Capgrave, in the Assembly of Gods, the Court of Sapience, the book of La Tour Landry printed by Caxton, and so on; and didactics were abundant unmixed, as in Cato, in Peter Idle’s Instructions to his son, in Ashby’s Activa Pollecia Principis, in Barclay’s Mirror of Good Manners, in the whole group of Regements and Secrees on the one hand, of books of nurture on the other. The purpose of Hawes and of Barclay, later, is equally tutorial. Skelton translated Diodorus Siculus, Barclay translated Sallust; but into his freer work each of these men brought an air of contemporary life which we do not find in Hawes. Far more is this the case with Skelton; and beyond him, outside the limits of “formal” verse, there appears a mass of loudmouthed roughly written satire and foolery in which he too has a hand, though keeping his hold on standard subjects. Between the two extremes, hybrid forms exist; a poem like “How a Lover Praiseth his Lady” attempts to use stereotyped material, but constantly betrays a freer tone and spirit. Interest in everyday and low-class character shows itself, although the lists of beggars and knaves and drunkards are as definitely lists as was the Fall of Princes; and as far back as Hoccleve and Bokenam, in our period, the individual was talking about himself at the same time that he was writing correct and lifeless matter for publication. But all along with the increase of bourgeois feeling and with the hybrids ran the persistent stereotype. The Temple of Glass, the Black Knight, the Flower and Leaf, the Assembly of Ladies, the Court of Love, the Isle of Ladies, La Belle Dame, the Cuckoo and Nightingale,— all court poems of the Chaucerian school, are except the last, of the standard court- narrative model, conforming to French tradition. Most of the court-lyric, such as the translations of Charles d’Orléans and the anonymous love-poems of Fairfax 16, also follows copy. Features of interest, even of beauty, are presented by many of these poems; the grace of the Cuckoo and Nightingale or of the Lover’s Mass, and the superiority of verse-flow in the Orléans translations as compared e.g. with Lydgate’s work, are very marked. When the share of aristocratic writers in literary production increases, with the growing power of Humanism, the courtly lyric takes on new tones. But Wyatt and Surrey have already in their English blood a quality which they retain in the presence of the new material, and separate from it; they can most sweetly and clearly sing. . Neither in the narrative ballad nor in the form of pure song had lyric ever failed England. In the alehouse, the harvest field, the banqueting hall, the em- brasure where ladies plied their needles, there had always been the group of singers or the solo lutist. During the fifteenth century we become aware that the individual aristocrat is writing and singing his own poems, a custom derived GENERAL INTRODUCTION 17 perhaps from Provence and France. The Earl of Warwick, the Earl of Suffolk, later Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Earl of Surrey, Henry VIII himself, all try their hands at composition. And we recognize also the power of Church music in England, not only what the Latin hymns must have meant for the writing of English religious verse, but what choral music meant for the carols, for the quality of pure song. In the reigns of the Lancastrians the early music of England was in its bloom. Little or nothing remains of the earliest English musical compositon; but the fifteenth century saw the development of what is known as “the second English school”, of which the most eminent master was John of Dunstable. It was the first great age of counterpoint; in solo singers and in composers England outdistanced France and Flanders. Henry V, with his more military spirit, seems to have favored instrumental music; but Henry VI’s taste was for vocal, especially for religious song. His choir was famous, and compositions by the king himself are still extant. Martin le Franc, writing his Champion de Dames in 1436-44, describes the envy of Continental musicians as they listened to the English at the Court of Burgundy and despaired of rivalling such melodies. In 1442 the Privy Council! ordered Nicholas Sturgeon to “go and choose six singers of England such as the messenger that is come from the Emperor will desire for to go to the Emperor.” As far back as the beginning of the century, a Frenchman had celebrated the musicians of England,? and for gen- erations she held her power. But the beauty of song, whether on the lips of aristocrat, of cleric, or of the wandering harpist, is not paralleled in other fifteenth-century verse by a truly rhythmic sense. Words which the medieval Englishman linked to tune often seem to have been born in a tune; but the words which he employed to carry lesson or story, which he intended to reach the intellect, have frequently no kinship with rhythm. Of the many difficult problems in fifteenth-century verse criticism, the most persistent, are the method of analysis to be adopted and the determination of a text to be analyzed. The uncertainty which still surrounds the latter question renders inconclusive all the results which any method can at present yield. No satisfactory argument can be based on a text such as Professor Skeat offers for Chaucer; and should we turn instead to the Canterbury Tales material offered by the Chaucer Society, we have but eight, of the many MSS, from which to gen- -eralize. Of Chaucer’s minor poems we have indeed all the texts, but no estimate has yet been formed of the different scribal personalities and their modes of in- terference with a copy. For Lydgate and other fifteenth-century writers our position is far worse; we have in many cases only a single published text of each poem, giving us even less basis from which to argue. Every statement here made is therefore only a suggestion. Hitherto the method of analysis used on e.g. Lydgatian texts has been line- by-line. This method has perhaps some basis in the classical and the early Teu- tonic line-conception of verse, a conception which the establishment of rime has * Proceedings of the Privy Council, ed. Nicolas, v :218. * Bibl. de l’Ecole des Chartes 62:716-19. 18 ENGLISH VERSE necessarily changed ; but a stronger reason is the coercive power of the couplet- idea so marked in English. The writer who uses complex stanzas made up of unequal lines may earn from the critic a treatment stanza-by-stanza; but the man who writes in equal lines is assumed to have thought and worked line-by-line. One reason for the long popularity of the closed couplet was its adaptation to the metrical grasp of the average Englishman. He could see rime and rhythm in its small compactness, while its usual content of wit and wisdom was within his comprehension, and just enough above his power of expression to com-— mand his admiration. There was no uncomfortable tax on his knowledge, no “threat of loveliness” to chill him. The line-by-line method will be used here only with limitations. Were it our sole mode of analysis, it would disguise the inadequacies of Chaucer’s followers by fencing their work and his into small spaces where his power of phrase- manoeuvre cannot be seen. The way in which he surpassed the couplet-form his disciples did not recognize, nor do we if we treat him solely by line-types. The short phrase following the long breath-sweep of two lines and more, the line with less than five heavy syllables followed by the line of extra weight, the compounding of a twenty-line paragraph out of a half-dozen different sorts of line-movement adroitly interwoven, the running-over of one rime followed by pause and emphasis on the next, and the story proceeding all the while with per- fect clarity and ease, its high points exactly met by the special stresses of the verse,—here is rooted the student’s delight in Chaucer’s line-management. Of course we seek in Chaucer nothing like the emotional contrasts of phrase-length as in Shelley. Shelley may write, in the Epipsychidion,— an antelope In the suspended impulse of its lightness 85 Were less ethereally light; the brightness Of her divinest presence trembles through Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew Embodied in the windless heaven of June Amid the splendor-winged stars, the Moon Burns, inextinguishably beautiful. But although there is here, as in Chaucer, the long breath-run followed by a short phrase, although there is a light swift line such as Chaucer could on occasion write, there are things impossible to Chaucer,—the iteration of long i-sounds standing out of narrow vowels in the opening sentence, and the slow close of the passage on lingering polysyllables, after the isolated emphatic word Burns, This management of vowel-color and of tempo, like the choice of simile and of epithet and the exalted passion of the poet, are too sophisticated, too subtle for Chaucer. We can find alliteration in Chaucer, but no such subtlety as Keats’ The dreary melody of bedded reeds, (Endymion I, 239) with its long and short e’s and its half-submerged d’s. We can find skilful phrase-handling in Chaucer, but not such as Shelley’s. Nor do we expect it. Chaucer is a master of the larger speech-unit which his narrative key requires, GENERAL INTRODUCTION 19 and no man working in his key has ever done better. Indeed, his immediate successors failed most conspicuously in that particular. Lydgate is the striking example of this failure, just because Lydgate brought to a study of Chaucer the uneducated and timid mind moving line by line. He picked out from his master the kinds of line which might be written, and pro- ceeded to use them without any of Chaucer’s feeling for variety, for the pattern of the whole. He was by nature repetitive to excess, as his style shows, and the poverty of ideas which he joined to an unfortunate glibness resulted in an end- less and ill-organized stream of words whenever he was commanded to speak. The verse in which he arranges those words has no structural quality outside the line; it escapes analysis as a long series of huts connected by passages escapes being called architecture. We may apply to him the five types used by Professor Schick for the classification of his verses; but it must be with the proviso that such a treatment accords only with the mind of Lydgate, and in no wise with the mind of Chaucer, that it has no validity for real poetry. One of the many like- nesses between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth is the possibility of using on the verse of both periods the ruler five feet long. But for times of freer, larger feeling that ruler does not apply. It has been said above that Chaucer understood the shift of weight from line to line,—a phrase which must be made clearer before we can proceed. Eng- lish speech throws its major stresses upon the root-element of substantives, ad- jectives, and verbs; the iambic pentameter line has in theory five such stresses or heavy elements and five light or less important syllables, arranged alternately. In practice, an exact following of this pattern is not demanded; not only may the fall of verse-stress upon secondary syllables reduce the amount of grammatical stress in the line, and the appearance of important monosyllables in unaccented position change the balance of the line, but in all good verse this variation of the ripple, this shift of weight within the line, is sought by the artist. As Coventry Patmore says, the vital thing in English verse is “the perpetual conflict between the law of verse and the freedom of the language; each is incessantly though insignificantly violated for the purpose of giving effect to the other.” Or, as Charlton M. Lewis has said, “the actual movement of the verse does not exactly correspond with the ideal rhythmical scheme deep down in our minds; it plays about—but never wholly forsakes it.” An outward sign of a triumph of language over verse is the frequent appearance of a “‘trochee” among iambs, even of a spondee, or double heavy syllable, should the movement of thought require it; and this latter will make the line heavier just as the use of two syntactically un- important words to make up a foot will reduce the total weight of the line. When Chaucer writes But trewely to tellen atte laste, he has but three grammatically important syllables in a five-beat line; the verse is definitely underweighted ; and this underweighting is well adapted to the merely connective function of the line. Being a narrator by trade, Chaucer does not use the heavy line as often for a variant as he uses the light. The addition of stress to normal means, as we 20 ENGLISH VERSE have noted, the presence in the text of pictorial or motor-words. The descrip-~ tive writer thus naturally makes more use of the full-weighted or the heavy line, while the forward-pressing narrator tends to reduce the stress-value of his total. Speaking a language in which the inflexional -e was still a separate element, Chaucer could conform his narrative to iambic rhythm, more simply than can the modern poet; and in a full-stressed line he moves with a lighter tread. He has, normally, a high percentage of regular iambic lines, about fifty per cent of his work in each case; and heavy lines are not common. Underweighted lines which he introduces into his pentameter are not necessarily those carrying a notion of speed, such as “Or breke it at a renning with his heed,” nor are they reduced in weight because of their small value in the narrative, like the line cited in our Jast paragraph above. They most often appear because there must be variety in any verse-flow, and because the lighter line is the natural variant for a story- teller. In this respect there is a noticeable difference between Chaucer and William Morris, for instance. Comparing two passages of similar function, the opening of the Squire’s Tale and the opening of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, from the Earthly Paradise, we shall find that Chaucer has thirty normal iambic lines to Morris’ eighteen, six heavy in one foot to Morris’ fourteen; and that while Morris has a dozen or so of verses showing interior balance or compensation, i.e. a heavy and a light foot in the same line, Chaucer seeks this variant not at all. The Victorian’s love of sense-appeal is reflected in his richer heavier rhythm. It may be objected that the two passages are not strictly parallel in content. But the characteristic difference between the two poets is that Chaucer opens a ro- mantic tale and sets his stage with fewer properties; Morris produces at once his color, his draperies, and his emotions. It is the nature of the two poets which differentiates their modes of beginning, both in imagery and in rhythm. Every poet of artistic sensibility steers a little east or west of regularity. A course in the direction of reduced line-weights gives a less obtrusive result ; free use of the heavier line, or of the line with marked rhythmic divergence, challenges attention. If the words thus made conspicuous are important words, the variant is justified. When Chaucer puts into the four-beat movement of the Book of the Duchesse the line Blew, bright, clere was the air, he writes a headless line, he places the adjective bright in unstressed position, and he uses two strong pauses to throw his descriptive epithets into prominence. Thus he heightens his effect both by rhythmic flow, by conflict of rhythm and language, and by marked catches in the breath-lengths. Nor does he dull the emphasis by using such an eccentric combination repeatedly or without purpose. Eccentric lines may diverge from normal either in the grouping of their stressed syllables or in the total number of their syllables. The former variant is briefly mentioned above; as regards the latter, lines may vary by excess or by deficiency. If by excess, the line may have disyllabic or “feminine” rime, it may have an extra syllable at the opening (disyllabic upbeat), and it may have an extra syllable before the verse-pause, or “epic caesura.’’ With these variants, the five-beat line may run to twelve syllables; the extra syllable elsewhere than at GENERAL INTRODUCTION 21 the line-opening (resolved arsis) is not proven for Chaucer. If the line varies not by excess but by deficiency of syllable, this happens either at the opening of the line or at the verse-pause, and results in either the “headless” or the “broken- backed” line. An unaccented syllable is lacking in such case. Students recognize the occurrence of the first of these line-forms in Chaucer, frequently in his four-beat work, less in his pentameter as time goes on. The headless line may occur in groups in the four-beat Hous of Fame, but the small number of such cases in the Canterbury Tales seem to serve a special purpose, to be used for cataloguing or for emphasis. As for the brokenbacked line, its sanction by Chaucer is still doubtful. The four-beat work of Chaucer and that of his contemporary Gower differ markedly as regards these variants in syllable-count. Gower does not write head- less lines. The ten per cent of them in the Hous of Fame, book 1, the approxi- mately fourteen per cent of them in book 11, have no parallel in the Confessio Amantis. Gower also represses the natural lightenings and reversals of freely flowing speech; and the amount of rhythmic variety in his long poem is so rela- tively small that an effect of monotony results, an effect which closely cor- responds to the mental tone of the Confessio. But Lydgate shows in his work far more headless lines than Chaucer permitted in his pentameter; and he adds to his large number of lines short at their beginning an equal and some- times larger number of lines short an unaccented syllable at the verse-pause,— brokenbacked. For example :— And mony a tre,mo then I can telle Black Knight 81 Theffect of which,was as ye shal here ibid. 217 As his basis of full pentameter lines is frequently below the fifty per cent usual in Chaucer, Lydgate has, instead of Gower’s excess of normal over variant, an excess of variant over normal. And while Gower’s substance and style are con- firmed by his rhythm, Lydgate’s are in discord with it; they have none of the qualities which can justify such persistent emphasis. Now, if the thing said does not warrant the use of forceful variants, if the attention is summoned sharply to words not worth special emphasis, the effect on the listener is irritating. Lyd- gate’s heavy demands on the rhythmic ear are not justified by his matter. These divergences, these headless and brokenbacked lines, also occur repeatedly and in close proximity, so that the reader has the threefold tax of an emphatic variant unsupported by a content deserving emphasis, and aggressively recurrent. The mechanical excess and the aesthetic or intellectual deficiency in Lydgate’s verse so react upon one another that the result is more than doubly displeasing. Beside Lydgate, Hoccleve leads the list of English Chaucerians. The person- ality of this partly pious, partly dissipated government clerk, who knew Chaucer and felt real affection for his master, this writer of begging-letters, railer at himself, translator, miracle-monger, wouldbe scamp, and wooden versifier, is far more interesting than that of Lydgate. The amount of Hoccleve’s work is small as compared with that of Lydgate, and it includes no such proportion of com- missioned verse. Alongside the decorous hack-translation of the De Regimine be ENGLISH VERSE Principum done for Henry V, alongside a number of religious poems and a righteously indignant tongue-lashing of the heretic Oldcastle, are not a few compositions definitely autobiographical. Hoccleve’s work is all stanzaic, in penta- meter, and quite different as regards line-management from that of Lydgate. Here, as with Lydgate, there is uncertainty about the text; but so far as we can now see, Hoccleve writes very few of the lines scanted half a foot which are so common in Lydgate. His metrical characteristic is, that while holding steadily to the full ten syllables, he is not sensitive to the correspondence of syllables with verse-stress. He can write :— And with him hir seruant to the ship wente,— and many another such line syllable-filled and rhythm-empty. He and Lydgate had each a code; but while Lydgate erects Chaucer’s variants into types and over-uses them, Hoccleve watches the number of his syllables and hears no rhythm. As Hoccleve’s EETS editor points out, he “thwarts the run of his verse” at every turn by the prosaic arrangement of his syllables. Lydgate, on the other hand, is quite willing to write lines of less than ten syllables; but having adopted such variant-forms, his repetitive tendency overworks them to the injury of his whole. The tendencies of later pentameter-writers in the century were determined neither by Hoccleve nor by Lydgate. Even men showing Lydgate’s influence, like Metham, or Hawes or Cavendish in the sixteenth century, do not imitate his shortbreathed line-movement; and no one has a syllable-counting tendency. In most later cases there is no visible code on which verse is constructed. Perhaps because of the bewilderment caused by the loss of inflexional -e in pronunciation while it was still irregularly written, perhaps because of the cramping and inbreed- ing which weakened the intellectual fibre of the educated further with every dec- ade, the rhythmic sense of most English writers slid to the level of doggerel. In the Libel of English Policy, an earnest plea to government for “high tariff,” in the versified handbook of alchemy by George Ripley, in the romances of Love- lich, the awkward syllable-counting of Hoccleve and the awkward over-use of emphatic line-forms by Lydgate change to a reaching-after the rime-word without regard to the number or the placing of syllables in the line. This is doggerel; it becomes in the Libel a mere slither of words; and though there is less of a collapse of rhythm in Lovelich and in Hawes, their matter is so invertebrate that it disturbs the reader more than do the Libel’s purposeful, if clumsy lines. The codeless weakness of such degeneracy and the obstinately uncomprehend- ing codes of Lydgate and Hoccleve are the more marked because of a few striking examples of rhythmic sensitiveness. Conspicuous among these is the translation of Palladius’ De re rustica executed for Humphrey of Gloucester by an unnamed protégé at much the same time when Lydgate was beginning his Fall of Princes translation for the duke. I have elsewhere! commented on the re- markable smoothness and accuracy of the existing texts of this translation, and pointed out that in its first 1800 lines there are no cases of clipped lines, almost *Modern Philology XXIII, 148. GENERAL INTRODUCTION ' 23 no error in the scribe’s treatment of inflexional -e, and every sign of a competent user of language and rhythm. The matter of the poem is unpoetical enough, with its instructions as to bee-keeping, poultry-management, the choice of soils, the times of planting, etc.; but there is no monotony and no clumsiness in the handling of the verse. The prologue and the connectives between books have much about Gloucester, and display adroit manipulation of rhetorical devices, as the passages included in this anthology will show. And there is clever workman- ship in the stanza-variations of the Lover’s Mass. When these pieces of work were done, and when the anonymous translations of Charles d’Orléans were executed, or earlier in the Boethius of Walton, some men were still sensitive to . the relation between language and verse. But throughout the period, the incompe- tents are in the majority ; and the further we go from Chaucer the feebler the gen- eral sense of rhythm. The incapacity of Hawes, the stiffness of Barclay, the mix- ture of lowclass slapstick and upperclass stereotype in Skelton, give place to the doggerel of Morley, the puerility of Nevill, and the curious double movement of Wyatt and of Surrey. Neither of these first masters of the sonnet walks very securely in the long line. Wyatt is much given to the wrenching of accent for rhythm’s sake, a preciosity we can see in Walter’s Guiscard and Sigismonda be- fore him and in Swinburne or Rossetti after him; and Surrey’s blank verse is tentative. But both they and Skelton can sing with perfect ease and sweetness. When they sing, they turn from older and from newer formal] line-groupings and from pentameter, to shorter verses not equal in length; they find their full release by a variant other than the rhythmic, as the writer of the Lover’s Mass had found it. But generally throughout the Transition the stereotype of form is as heavy as is that of style and subject. It was de rigueur to write pentameter, and espe- cially to write it in rime royal. The amount of seven-line stanza in the period is enormous, from Walton’s translation of Boethius (part only) through Lyd- gate’s Fall of Princes and Ripley’s Compend of Alchemy to Hawes’ Pastime of Pleasure and to Cavendish and Sackville. The romances had their own inherited strophes; but the religious, the didactic, and the occasional verse of the Transi- tion preferred the seven-line stanza. The couplet, either four-beat or five-beat, was not apparently favored even by Chaucer’s immediate followers to any such extent as was rime royal. How far this preference was the poets’ own is uncertain. For although the great bulk of the Fall of Princes, the almost 6,000 lines of the Life of Our Lady, and the 3,700 lines of St. Edmund, raise the count of Lydgate’s seven-line stanzas high over that of his eights, these are com- missioned works, the Fall of Princes and the Palladius-translation both done to Gloucester’s order at the same time in the same strophe-form. And Lydgate’s eight-line stanza, constructed as a double quatrain, carries a large number of short poems, often religious, which may have been put into that form by his own choice. Hoccleve also uses the eight-line (and nine-line) stanza in his oc- casional poems, where he speaks more independently than in the Regement of Princes or in his narrative verse. But the later writers of the century preferred rime royal. Perhaps the taste of earlier patrons, imposed on the translations 24 ENGLISH VERSE which they ordered, took effect on subsequent versifiers; certainly both Cavendish and Sackville had the Fall of Princes in mind when writing their seven-line stanzas. Occasionally there is variation of form within the one work. Lydgate’s Temple of Glass uses five-beat couplets and stanzas; Hawes changes from rime royal to couplet when he introduces the Godfrey Gobelive episodes into his Pas- time; Barclay’s insertion of a stanzaic Complaint into his pentameter-couplet Fourth Eclogue doubtless seemed to him very effective. But the narrow range of this variation, as compared with Chaucer in the Anelida, or with the Lover’s Mass, or with Skelton in his Garland of Laurel, shows the timidity of the English Transition code. When the Humanistic change came it came at first in form more than in subject or in style; the sonnet and blank verse are more definitely novelties in form than was Barclay’s introduction of the eclogue, and were ad- dressed to a public more in need of new verse-moulds than was the public which enjoyed Skelton’s tumbling verse. A road having been broken in one direction, the bourgeois subjects which were struggling into notice could push further for- ward. Sometimes they stumbled in the couplet, sometimes in the stanza, as either the political doggerel against Suffolk or the Hye Way to the Spyttelhous may show. And the disappearance of fourteenth-century stanzas derived from jongleur or from Latin hymns, of the complexities of strophe as in the Miracle Plays, is as marked as is the sixteenth-century appearance of humanistic forms and development of song. Outside the stanza and couplet there is little verse-form in the Transition upon which to comment. Skeat assigns the partly terza rima Complaint to his Lady to Chaucer ; the Anelida contains a rhetorical exercise in medial rime and in echo which we find again in the Lover’s Mass and in Palladius; Skelton plays with short lines; and there are a few roundels in the period, from that at the close of the Parlement of Foules to those translated from Orléans. Some undated manuscripts contain free lyric verse which, if of the mid-sixteenth cen- tury, arrives when expected, and if of the fifteenth, is still more interesting. The Cambridge University codex Ff i, 6 is such a volume. But in general, there is less variety of verse-form, as of verse-tone, in the English post-Chaucerian period than in the Scottish. The difference in social growth between England and Scotland in the fif- teenth century may in part account for the fact that Chaucer’s Scottish followers do not by any means suffer the rhythmic and intellectual disorder so marked in the Southern writers. English Chaucerians did over again, and botched, a work already done to admiration; but the master’s influence was really felt by Scotsmen. When the spirit of Scottish nationality asserted itself, in the four- teenth century, the Bruce of John Barbour gave it enthusiastic expression, and the tide of national poetry began to rise. It continued throughout the fifteenth century, in the popular ballads and in the popular epic of Blind Harry’s Wallace. Alongside this stream of genuine national expression, borne on the same tide of rising vitality, runs the more intellectual and formal poetry of King James the First, of Robert Henryson, of William Dunbar, and of Gavin Douglas, to alJ GENERAL INTRODUCTION 25 of whom, except perhaps to Dunbar, Chaucer is master and model. This more lettered aspect of the Scottish florescence shows itself first in King James (died 1437), and then in Henryson, the “Schoolmaster of Dunfermline,” who died about 1506. In them and in Dunbar, who died in 1520, we find, looking at the technical side alone, a control of line and of stanza, a definiteness of purpose, and an assured ease of movement, which neither Lydgate nor Hoccleve ever at- tained. King James’s one poem, the Kingis Quair, is somewhat hampered by its allegorical machinery, but James, like Henryson, has his verse under control. Henryson, though claiming for his Fables a “morale sweit sentence” which he considers it the duty of the poet to provide, keeps his moral from encroach- ing on his narrative,—a restraint impossible to Lydgate; and in his Testament of Cresseid he goes far from the shrewd and simple humor of the Fables to strike a note of passionate pity loftier than anything written by his more versatile and vigorous compatriot Dunbar, whom criticism generally terms the greatest of the group. Dunbar, rich in a begging friar’s experience of life, is a professional poet of the stock of Skelton and the tribe of Rabelais. He tried his hand at many meters and managed all easily; he can praise the Virgin, abuse his fel- lowpoets, lash the vices of the time, and shudder at death, with equal fluency and force. And in quieter moods he can sound a note of solemn dignity in the Lament for the Makaris, and write the neat allegorical compliment of the Thrissill and the Rois. But his widemouthed boisterous vigor, the graceful sentiment of King James, and the quiet amused penetration of Henryson, all take something of their form and pressure from Chaucer; and all these poets are competent workmen. Gavin Douglas, bishop of Dunkeld (died ca.1522), is a different personality. If Dunbar is akin to Skelton, Douglas is akin to Lydgate and to Hawes, though a much larger man than they. Certain of the conventions obeyed by them he has; his Palice of Honour is as heavily allegorical as the Court of Sapience or the Flower and Leaf; and in much of his work there is a straining for “‘aureat language” which, as in Hawes, speaks the rhetorician rather than the poet. This connects Douglas with such Frenchmen as St. Gelais and Molinet; indeed, his likeness to Octovien de St. Gelais, also bishop, rhetorician, and translator of Virgil, is marked. But wholly a pedant Douglas was not. The interesting escapes of personal expression and of nature-feeling in his prologues to the Aeneid, and his harsh but not systematically harsh treatment of the five-beat line, give him advantage over Lydgate, even over the nature-bits of the Troy Book. According to Professor Saintsbury, Douglas makes some use of the brokenbacked line; but until the relation of his verse to St. Gelais’ Aeneid-translation, made in French pentameter couplet, can be worked out, there can be no full discussion of the technique of Douglas. Verse-modeling and style develop parallel in all these writers. With the establishment of rime in late Latin and in the West European languages, the medieval system of “colores rhetorici” received additional floriations. To the accepted modes of literary amplification, to the “digressio,” “descriptio,” and “ex- clamatio” which we see used e.g. in Chaucer’s more academic narratives, to the management of interpretation, of comparisons, and of word-play, there were added 26 ENGLISH VERSE the effects obtainable by rime-combination. All varieties of stanza, all possi- bilities of medial rime, echo, interlace, etc., were worked by the French poet- rhetoricians, but were less favored in England. There the feeling for rime as a mode of stress might lead to its over-use by restless-minded men, but with the more sluggish-minded it led to the phrase-tag. The difference in its handling marks the difference between Skelton and Lydgate, just as its use now for empha- sis, now in formula, now partially blurred by enjambement, marks the Chaucerian control of technique. A study of rime in Chaucer or in Lydgate is scarcely begun when its purity or impurity has been noted; the subjugation of rime to poetic purpose is the root of the matter, with its various aspects of phrase lengthened over the rime, phrase-formula used for rime’s sake, shift of emphasis from rime-word to mid-line and back, etc. The second of these subjects, so far as Chaucer and Lygate are concerned, is discussed in the introductory essay on Lydgate here; but the two other aspects mentioned require far more comment than this book can give. So with the question of vocabulary and word-usage in the Transition; the rigor mortis which held rhythm and held narrative-power pressed heavily on the treatment of the word. Something of this may be ascribed to the great amount of commanded translation in the period; but in passing the responsibility from poet to patron we do not remove it from the group. The late medieval versifier or reader had no notion of the metaphors latent but vital in words, of the power resident in the “fringe” of a verb or adjective and evocable by slightly shifting the angle of vision. There is a strong etymological interest in words, and there is abundance of abstract terminology new in English; but there is little or no development in meaning. Chaucer’s “smoky rain,’ Lydgate’s “restless stone” of Sisyphus, are rarities in Early English. Although Chaucer’s senses were far more alert, his perceptual power far higher than those of his English followers, he is no specialist in word or phrase. The characteristic action which he sees so truly he presents in lines or in brief scenes. Concentration is not a quality of the Middle Ages. And as the Middle Ages yielded to the impact of Humanism, two general tendencies become marked in the use of words by English writers. There is the riotous extravagance of Skelton, in whose texts we find the inexplicable word as well as the inexplicable local allusion; such a word is obviously either a bit of showman’s lingo or a boisterous coinage on Skelton’s part. In Hawes and Nevill is the other tendency. Their pedantry strives for “aureat language’; Hawes loads his verse with terms like depure, facundious, solacious, oblocucioun, pulchritude, etc.; but both he and Nevill also use words, especially verbs, so vaguely and insecurely that we find no mean- ing in them.1. We often do not know what Hawes intends to say by his use of exemplify or inspect or ratify; and his failure to pass on meaning is doubtless due to his own vagueness on the point. St. Gelais and the later rhétoriqueurs in France, Lyly or the seventeenth-century Latinists in England, show the same tendency, which is less a matter of chronology than of social and educational maladjustments. This attitude to language Hawes does not derive from his “master Lydgate”; Lydgate muddles his syntax badly, and employs the dead See note on the Pastime of Pleasure, line 78. GENERAL INTRODUCTION Ze phrase for rime, but he rarely wanders from the essential meaning of a Latin word. His very large contribution to the English vocabulary? does not deepen or intensify language; it has no procreative power. He does not even carry it easily, as Hoccleve had carried his limited human common-sense vocabulary ; but he does provide English with a mass of useful abstract terms which he manages with accuracy, but which the pedants of the later Transition blurred. Chaucer attained his rhythmical and critical poise in an imperfectly devel- oped and ill-adjusted age. He could not bequeath it. The power to control material can be received only by those mentally capable of receiving it; and the resettlement of the stereotype on English society just after his death, the increas- ing lack of educational opportunity of the early fifteenth century in England, smothered the growth of any such mentality. Pattern can be a relentless thing; if it encroaches on the imaginative field, the imagination either submits, or escapes only to extravagance and disordered unsymmetry. Not merely in Transitional rhythmic work and Transitional use of the formula or of the rhetorical code, does this appear, but in Transitional narrative. At the opening of the fifteenth century the English narrator had before him as narrative-types the fabliau, the saint’s legend, the allegory, and the romance. The first was frankly bourgeois, as the second was religious; both were small- scale. Allegory and romance are oftenest large-scale narratives, and the former has at its best a sense of causality working in human affairs which makes it an important factor in the development of structural feeling. Both it and the romance are also of moment in narrative-shaping because of their mass, because the mere handling of a great quantity of material urges a workman towards structure. For several of these story-forms the work of Chaucer offered examples. He had brought the fabliau, especially, to a high state of finish as regards econ- omy, dexterity, and single-figure portrayal; but in the eyes of his followers such tales were permissible only because their tellers were at the moment specially privileged; the presentation of such material would not only be impossible to the hand of Hoccleve or of Lydgate, but to their code. The “tragedy,” as in the Monk’s tale, or the saint’s legend, as in those of Prioress and Second Nun, seemed, however, a very fit subject to the Transition workman, who probably saw no difference in the sincerity of Chaucer’s attitude to the one and the other. The saint’s legend ran out, as a productive vein, by the close of the fifteenth century. It was hampered by its religious character. Its protagonist possessed no human failings, and the various antagonists no redeeming features; the two great opportunities of narrative, the dilemma and the error, were rarely permitted in the legend. Suspense, except in an elementary repetitive form, and complica- tion, are absent. Visualization is infrequent; the stage is rarely set; and dia- logue, used mainly for conversion or for miracle-working, shows no conflict of motive within the individual. Capgrave’s St. Katherine endeavors to explain action and prepare for event; and in the lengthy discourses of the princess and her ministers regarding her marriage there is evident the author’s sober legal * See the Introd. to Lydgate, pp. 87 ff. below. 28 ENGLISH VERSE pleasure in weighing and stating a case. There is spirit in the speeches with which the proposals of the steward are rejected, in Bradshaw’s St. Werburge; but generally the legends lack the mundane vigor of utterance which had been pres- ent in the miracle-plays, and are lacking also in the dignity and the pathos which their circumstances permit. Nor does management of detail show a strong hand. Capgrave sometimes notes facial expression, or uses a fortunate homely simile; and in Bokenam there is another kind of leaning towards actuality in the author’s frank and even playful comment. But in the most prolific of all the legend-writers of the period, John Lydgate, the personal or pictorial is at the minimum, and the weak repetitive method is burdened by masses of didactic di- gression in which the narrative current almost disappears. Fifteenth-century legend-writers brought narrative no nearer to the object of study. So far as plot was concerned, the workmen striving after magnitude sought it on the method of piling like details atop of one another; the notion of bringing the figure closer to the eye, instead of increasing the size of the canvas, is outside the comprehension of most medieval narrators. Was a narrative to be more im- pressive or more heroic, it had more tortures or more combats added to it. But still more did the failure of the legend to quicken human feeling inhere in the rigidity of its conception of human character. Its attempt to raise the pitch of life was unsuccessful, while that of romance succeeded, because of its tenuous contact with reality; its structure was often feebly repetitive; and the greatest study in life, personality, could receive no furtherance from its refusal to see aught but white and black. The two great dangers of English literary expression, formlessness and didacticism, were thus encouraged by legend-writing; and they were not com- bated by another medieval narrative type, the allegory. Allegory resembles the legend, and differs from fabliau and romance, in the rigidity of its material and in its attempt to instruct. There is little or nothing in allegory of the amused bourgeois temper which appears in the fable or the fabliau, and rarely an interest in humanity. Some advance there is over the saints’ legends in the larger plan and in the insistence upon causality; to this extent the hand of narrative is strengthened, although clumsily and impersonally. The type is Eastern in its origin and Christian in its development; in Christian literatures it is a hybrid between the narrative and the homily. It became weak or restricted in the Tran- sition; and we may query if this were not in a measure due to the new method of treating the Biblical text, if the new exegesis did not affect the popularity of the method. The necessity for an interpretation of Biblical language other than the literal or surface had been maintained especially by the great Church father Origen, followed by the greater St. Augustine in the fourth century. Such Biblical exegesis, starting from belief in verbal inspiration and determined to press the obstinate letter into harmony with Christian desire, dominated the Middle Ages, and its method extended to creative narrative. It felt in the word or in the narrative not those connotations for senses and for memory, not those recognitions of human experience, which had been pagan and which were over- borne by the Christian Church, but a set of moral and ethical precepts. The en- GENERAL INTRODUCTION 29 cyclopedists, like Isidor or Fulgentius, give allegoric etymologies for terms and names; the treatment of pagan poets such as Virgil, Ovid, and Homer, is one of the curiosities of criticism; and the impulse goes over also into the creative field. Churchmen like Alanus de Insulis and Martianus Capella composed ex- tensive allegorical narrative, peopled by personified abstractions; Dante himself lives in spite of, not because of, the method with which he is saturated; Petrarch, and even the bourgeois Boccaccio, viewed poetry, with Dante, as “concealing truth under the beauteous veil of the fable.’ Lydgate and Hawes accept this as the function of poetry; for them fable, or story, is a “covert” for truth, is a “cloak- ing colour.” Hawes, however, implies, and later writers confirm, a growing indifference to allegorical narrative on the part of the uncultivated public. He himself, in his Pastime of Pleasure, mixes his allegory with romantic combat and amour, with pseudo-learning, and with the farcical episode of Godfrey Gobelive,—per- haps to assure himself of a hearing with his royal patrons. In the bourgeois public, with its taste for the actual, loss of popularity for the allegory was bound to come; while from the best-educated, for another reason, there also came a limiting of the scope of allegory. The Augustinian doctrine of verbal inspiration, with its consequent desire to wrench and press the word, yielded, so far as the strongest minds were concerned, to the doctrine of historic inter- pretation held by St. Jerome, and championed in the early days of Humanism by Tyndale, by Colet, and by Erasmus. Nevertheless, the tendency to personification, the interest in a double mean- ing or a concealment, were not eradicated by the Renaissance. Under disguise of chevalier or of censor the allegorical method persisted; Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, use the one cloak, Skelton, Dryden, Swift, the other. Pure didactic allegory had its last great treatment in Bunyan and in Comus, but the method is not dead, nor will it die. As Lipprhann has said, the will to find an implied meaning beneath an obvious is “the deepest of all stereotypes.” Our class- shift today has brought not only popular interest in riddle and puzzle, but in Shaw, in Barrie, in Capek. And although we have nominally accepted the “higher criticism,’ in thousands of pulpits the method of allegory lives on defiant. Rigid itself, allegory links readily with those devices for expression which are rigid. The largest form in which it moves is the Pilgrimage or Quest; smaller and more static forms are the Procession or ‘“Defile,” and the Parlia- ment. The Nuptials and Battles of the more pompous Latin were never popu- lar in France or in England, although the “estrif,” as a sort of midway-type be- tween the contest and the Parliament, was favored in legally-minded France and Provence. The Pilgrimage-motive probably owed some of its popularity to its connection with reality, with that religious or chivalric taking of the road which meant so much to the medieval mind, and which, as a traveling toward the unknown, will always have fascination for humanity. These two could be forced into combination, as in the Anticlaudianus of Alanus, in Chaucer’s Hous of Fame, in Christine de Pisan’s Chemin de long Estude. And there was in 30 ENGLISH VERSE them some chance for character-interplay, for episode, which the Procession had not. The mere line of figures “passing a given point,” and all guided by a common feeling, as in Boccaccio’s De Casibus or the Dance Macabre or the Ship of Fools, meets allegory only in so far as it uses personification, like Petrarch’s Trionfi. It was such a list, when real persons were summoned, as by Cavendish or by Sackville, that contributed solid material to the Tudor drama; and from a list of actual people, be it of Chaucer’s Prologue, or of the Ship of Fools, or of the seventeenth-century “characters,” or of Henley’s Hospital Sketches, or of the Spoon River Anthology, interest never dies out. It was this intrusion of the real person, whether coming from past history or from contemporary life, into narrative, which most surely undermined the credit of Personification, as applied to abstractions or to qualities. After a long period of attempt to modify life, men began more correctly to report it; and any increase of human perception is in the line of human development. Conduct in narrative began to be determined not by precept but by human prob- ability or by recorded fact; that is, it underwent just the same change that had been made in Biblical interpretation. The Tudor dramatic narrative, when tragic, insisted on that Causality which allegory had helped it to realize; and it attempted something which neither fabliau nor satire ever had, but which alle- gory and romance consciously sought,—a raising of the pitch of life. Such a raising of life above the everyday was theoretically the business of romance as well as of allegory; but many romances, both English and French, are nearly as conventional in their central figures as if they were allegories. The hero is really Courage or Loyalty or Love, whatever his appellation. It is the event which is “romantic,” the succession of ordeals to which the hero is sub- jected. In the degenerate romances the canvas is overloaded with such ordeals, with perils, deceptions, combats, even as the saint’s legend was overloaded with tortures or miracles. In both, the repetitive method, the lack of purpose and of humanity, drive the type to exhaustion. But to this summary generalization there are three great West European exceptions,—Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century, Jean de Meun in the thirteenth, and Sir Thomas Malory in the late fifteenth century. The work of de Meun, despite its allegorical disguise and romantic plan, belongs rather among satires than among romances; this was clearly perceived by Christine de Pisan and her group, and by an indignant Church. Chaucer rec- ognized his intellectual kinsman, and was as well able as de Meun to use the double method, as well able as the Cock of his own Nun’s Priest. But the fif- teenth and early sixteenth centuries knew little or nothing of innuendo in satire; they used not the rapier but the bludgeon for criticism. The popularity of de Meun waned as the popularity of romantic allegory waned, not because of impa- tience with de Meun’s real intention, but because men failed to see that inten- tion through the outmoded stereotype. Chrétien and Malory approach romantic material very differently from de Meun, and each possesses a characteristic not usually displayed in the romance- type. Malory has to a remarkable extent that sense of causality working in GENERAL INTRODUCTION 31 human experience which is to appear more powerfully in Shakespearian tragedy. And Chrétien, while handling romantic material, does it on occasion in a spirit as bourgeois as Chaucer’s own, with as shrewdly amused a sense of human pre’ences and inconsistencies. Neither of these great qualities, the bourgeois understanding of average human nature or the tragic sense of the ills of life as self-caused, was possessed by the fifteenth century generally; but in Chaucer’s age the former was there in full and the latter in an undeveloped form. Both, for instance, are in Boccaccio, in his Decameron and in his De Casibus. Knowledge of Chrétien on Chaucer’s part has not been demonstrated; but no student of literature can read the dialogues between Troilus and Pandarus without turning again to Chrétien’s Yvain and pondering the conversations be- tween the hesitating widow and her sprightly maid. Nor can a student refrain from drawing the spiritual comparison, whether contact between the two writers be proved or not. For if a nation’s political and social conditions are of any effect upon her writers, then similarities in those respects between two Occidental countries may produce similar results without direct borrowing. Let a narrative outline come into the hands of two keen observers of human nature, each living in a period of strong political vitality, of rising bourgeois aspirations, and of a more clearly personal view of woman than heretofore, and those writers’ handling of a human situation may well be similar. Chaucer may not have known the Decameron, he may not have read Chrétien; but he lived in a fer- ment of social conditions very like that around the Italian and the Frenchman, and towards that ferment his attitude was, as theirs, the ironic smile of the observer. The mass of English romances is of the fourteenth century. Much of it came from France by translation, and to the student of narrative the handling of the French original by the English workman is especially interesting. The principal romances of the late Middle*Ages which allow us to compare the ex- isting French with the existing English are Partonopeus de Blois, William of Palerne, the Launfal stories, Li Biaus Desconus, and Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain—in English as Ywain and Gawain. The treatment of these stories by English translators varies from William of Palerne, which is a free paraphrase, to a somewhat close rendering as in Partonope of Blois. Of course, any medieval adapter felt himself at liberty to expand or alter plot; it is the English treatment of character, of background, which particularly interests us. It often happens, in the better romances, that real traits of character ap- pear. The romance is not so rigid as the saint’s legend; its protagonist may make mistakes, and may even be depicted in a ridiculous situation, as in Par- tonope of Blois and in Li Biaus Desconus. The background was often ample, and with many moving figures; though the effect might be that of the shallow crowding of tapestry, though ‘“‘as in a faded tapestry, the brilliance of the dresses might outlast the flesh-color,” yet the eye of the romancer could and did move frcm one focus to another. The romance had a freer hand than the legend to develop not only character but structure ; its manoeuvring-ground was larger than that of the fable or fabliau, 32 ENGLISH VERSE giving room not only for the delineation of character by dialogue but for antici- pation, surprise, suspense, retard, for the management of transition. Chaucer’s strength had lain in the single scene, the Friar entering the cottage of the sick churl, the conversation between the Cock and the Fox; and in some of the ro- mances we can find larger-scale character-management. In Chrétien’s Yvain, for example, the hero is concealed by a pitying waiting-maid in the castle of a seigneur whom he has pursued and slain on the castle’s threshold, only to be trapped by the fall of the portcullis behind him. From an upper window Yvain watches the obsequies of the seigneur, and falls deeply in love with the widow. He must and will wed her ; and the waiting woman sets about the task of persuading her mistress. The scenes in which this is accomplished, the picture of the widow’s abating anger and growing coquetry, and of the embarrassed first meeting of the two lovers, are of extraordinary interest to students of narrative. This transfer of interest from the physical combat or the intellectual disputation to the conflict of human emotions is Chrétien’s principal service to storytelling. He is not alone in his occupation with it; many biblical narratives and much of Ovid before him, Boccaccio’s Filostrato and the sonnets of Petrarch after him, focussed attention upon the ebb and flow of feeling. But where Chrétien, like Boccaccio, excelled, was in his sense of time, his recognition of the need to make the change of emo- tional front gradual, of avoiding the leap from one narrative position to another. Both he and Renaud, the author of Li Biaus Desconus, were aware of the effec- tiveness of hesitation. Renaud represents his hero as sitting on the side of his bed and debating whether or not he shall go to his lady’s room; he says :— Trai-je, ou ci remanrai? Ma dame le m’a desfendu, Et par sanblant ai je veu Ele veut bien que je i aille. At last he ventures. But the lady is a fairy, and as he is about to cross her thresh- old, a spell falls on him; he finds himself hanging in the air over a raging torrent. He shouts for help; but when the servants rush in with torches, the torrent dis- appears, and he seems the victim of a nightmare, to his great chagrin. Were this magical episode presented without the hero’s musing, we should treat it as mere fantasy ; but the stamp of reality is given it by the preceding very human hesitation and by the comedy-discovery. One of the few noteworthy structural or psycho- logical moments in Lydgate’s mass of narrative, we may note, is the study, in the Fall of Princes i: 4943 ff., of Althea’s hesitation over the fatal brand. Here the monk turns aside from his usual source, where the matter is dealt with in one sentence, to follow Ovid’s study of the mother’s contending feelings; and inade- quate though the English be, the choice of technique is a point in Lydgate’s favor. Another noteworthy feature of the better romances is the attention to ad- ministrative (say) as well as to psychological transition. In the two French ro- mances just mentioned there is obvious care in the fitting of joints. And in Eger and Grine, an English story of which no French parallel is known, the knight Grine passes a lady’s castle on his way to avenge his comrade Eger; she implores him to abandon the adventure, but he is obdurate and goes on. On his GENERAL INTRODUCTION 33 return, successful, he knocks on the door of the room where the lady is sitting in anxiety for him; and her waitingwoman, opening it cries out, ‘““O madam, now is come that knight That went hence when the day was bright.” The inferior romances would have jumped this detail, would have seen the story intermittently, would have recorded merely that the knight returned and that the lady was re- joiced. It is in this spacing-out and continued visualization of story between major events that mastery of structure is most needed. A lyrical or emotional writer may depict situation with power, but the great narrative writer must possess also the ability to get from situation to situation without loss of power. Immature or degenerate narrative betrays its weakness in lack of transitional management quite as much as in failure at the emotional nodus. Even in a man so close to Shakespeare as was Marlowe the difficulty of making transitions is evident; the poet who wrote the death-scene of Edward II wrote also the clumsy shift of the king from one favorite to another, in the same play. This power is at bottom the power of continuing to visualize while the figures move. With such visualizing power goes often a clear view of the background. In Li Biaus Desconus is a feeling for light and darkness comparable to that of Mrs. Radcliffe or of Coleridge, to scenes in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. When the knight sits on his charger in the enchanted castle of the thousand windows and the thousand lights, with the thousand musicians clashing their instruments at him in one moment, and the whole brilliant scene plunged into utter darkness and silence at the next, the fantastic scene is made convincing to us by our own sense of the threat of darkness as a concealer. Renaud also understood, as Mrs. Radcliffe understood and as Hawthorne or Stevenson understood, the alarming and puzzling effect of sound without accompanying sight. The cries from the distance in the wood, which cause the Bel Inconnu to hurry to the rescue, throw his train into terror. Renaud never fails, either, to note the lighting of his scene; and this imparts reality even to the fantastic, as we have said. The coming-in of candles or torches is always mentioned by him, as it is in the Merchant of Venice; and moonlight is not omitted from his descriptions. It is sensitiveness in the writer which brings the background into the story ; it is sensitiveness which works against the earlier medieval “contempt of interval,” to borrow a phrase from Leigh Hunt. And it is a failure of sensitiveness, an oppression by the stereotype, which deprives Transition narrators of the power to see and to develop motives, to see behind their characters, and even to see those characters distinctly, whether in life or in another man’s pages. The Transi- tion writer saw a list of personages, but saw not the method of portrayal; he saw a sumptuous array of trappings, for instance in the Knight’s Tale, and be- lieved, like the youthful Keats gazing into the clouds, that high romance was em- bodied in those symbols. Such poems as the Flower and the Leaf, the Assembly of Ladies, the Belle Dame sans Merci (translated), are episodes rather than nar- ratives, and are handled like tapestry. The garden, the bridge, the pavilion, the mounted knight, the coiffed and jewelled ladies, the stiffly marshalled or conven- tionally dancing courtiers, are all seen in the same focus. But even when the foreground is more fully treated, as in the Churl and the Bird or the much longer 34 ENGLISH VERSE Troy Book, there is small gain in character-presentation. Nearest reality is the Medea of the Troy Book, a creature whom no ineptitude can wither or stale; but both there and in the Brunhilde of the Fall of Princes we must reckon with an earlier source. And we observe that when Lydgate goes outside courtly models for his material, as in the prologue to Thebes, in his Fables, in his Mumming at Hertford, we find no release of ability to draw character, not so much as in the clumsy prologue to the tale of Beryn. Nor do we find it in Hawes, when he shifts from his pedantic-romantic plot to introduce Godfrey Gobelive. And when the bourgeois spirit gets expression in character-portrayal, it has no better vision; it changes material but hardly method. Its list is of rapscallions instead of the illustrious unfortunate, the Hye Way to the Spyttelhous instead of the Fall of Princes ; but the list remains, and the lack of vision remains. The latter comes, however, from a different source, from the insensitiveness of ignorance instead of from the insensitiveness caused by a paralyzing stereotype. When the ignorance is remedied, vision is attained; a sympathy for the human being, a consciousness of his surrounding life, are felt and expressed, and not till then. There is no more sense of snow and wind in the Hye Way to the Spyttelhous than there is of salt air in the Ship of Fools, and no more intention of recognizing it. Lydgate’s rain- storms and sunrises in the Troy Book (for which we do not know his original) © and Douglas’ prefaces to the separate books of his Aeneid-translation are the best example in formal Transition verse of a natural background to narrative; but a mere touch during the course of the story, such as Nevill’s unexpected picture of evening or Henryson’s opening of the Testament of Cresseid, is of more value than set pieces. But in the very midst of the Transition muddling of structure and blurring of vision, the Transition’s blindness to the method of Chrétien or of Renaud or of Chaucer, a greater than Henryson, in England, laid his hand upon the already stiffened mass of romantic narrative, and raised the Arthurian story to permanent life. Malory’s imagination was of far larger calibre than that possessed by Henryson; and to his sense-perception, his power of seeing, hearing, and feeling his personages, the way in which his eye holds the picture while his figures move, Malory adds a strong sense of structure. Perhaps the huge com- pilations of the latter Middle Ages brought gain to narrative in the sense of Causality which was pressed out of event by the sheer weight of material. Malory’s greatest service to English narrative is here, a greater even than his character-portrayal, than his prose. He bound the Arthurian stories together by a sense for causality, for the unescapable consequences of human conduct ; through the juxtaposed mass of separate narratives he drew the twisted thread of the three great Loyalties, to sovereign, to the beloved lady, to God; and by the shat- tering of the Round Table he showed that no man held those three in equal reverence, that no man served the Ideal, that punishment for such failure came here upon earth. Malory works toward tragedy, as Henryson toward comedy. The actual drama of the period gains now an inch here, now an inch there, as it struggles with allegory, with biblical fact, with history. From each of its sources, ex- GENERAL INTRODUCTION 35 cept perhaps from the saint’s legend, it received some advantage; allegory gave training in plot, the Bible-story stimulated to character-portrayal ; and when the actual historical personage appeared among the abstractions of the Morality, the step to the chronicle-play was short. But in the earlier plays of the great period which succeeded, power over character and over scene is still much more evident than power over structure; even of Marlowe this is true. The lesson of structure was slowly learned by England; not until the long period of externalized morality was past, and the moral struggle restored to its natural arena, the human heart and our present life, could the growth of drama or of narrative proceed. All through the Transition, the courtly maker and the cleric were controlled by the stereotypes of their class. That those stereotypes held so firm was due to the limitation of education and to the power of patronage. Their dominance in verse, especially, followed from the theory that the poet must write with a moral purpose, must use the cloak of fable in order to teach. The prose workman, not so restricted, might be sup- posed to move more freely; yet this freedom was not sought. From the argu- mentation of Wyclif and from the Boethius-translation of Chaucer down to Lord Berners’ translation of Froissart, the major prose works are the encyclo- pedias of Trevisa, the travels of “Mandeville,” the treatises of Pecock and of Fortescue, the translated romances and original prefaces of Caxton, and the Arthurian compilation of Malory. Briefer things, themselves longer than Cax- ton’s prefaces, also exist, of which one of the most interesting is the Serpent of Division, presumably by Lydgate, with which may be compared the addition to the Brut, or prose chronicle of England, ascribed to him; or Bokenam’s Mappula Anglie, the Paston correspondence, the Gesta Romanorum, the Master of Game, etc. The proportion of narrative is small, and of independently-handled narra- tive even smaller. What strikes us in most of these men is the freer stronger use of language and the partial release both of the mind and of the senses, as compared with con- temporary work in verse. Much less, too, is heard of a moral purpose,—a fact perhaps allied; and we constantly feel, even with the translator Trevisa at the opening of the century, that a personality is speaking. Already with him the Eng- lish is vigorous and racy, despite some pedantries; and “Mandeville” surpasses him. In those fantastic Travels, moreover, there is narrative movement; the story marches as no tale by Lydgate knows how to step. Pecock’s subject is of no such fascination as are the Oriental wanderings of Mandeville, and although his reason- ing interests us, as showing both his mental quality and his command of English, neither he nor Fortescue exerted such influence as did the narrators, preéminent among whom are Caxton and Malory. Caxton is far the more medieval; he is constantly conventional in choice of subject, in sentence movement, and in phrase. Like Trevisa and like Lord Berners, he favors paired terms and rhetorical pleo- nasms, and labors with involved sentences. But either his subject or his fidelity to ornate correctness pleased his public; the more medieval his work, the more editions it apparently received. His Golden Legend was a better seller than his Malory. 36 ENGLISH VERSE Malory stands by himself in this list of prose writers, as he does among romancers. He and Mandeville are both, as narrators, concerned frankly with their story; but he alone creates an atmosphere. Mandeville can and does obtain credence as well as interest; he knows as well as Swift the value for the human mind of the trivial as proof of the tremendous. But we remain outside Mande- ville’s narrative, absorbed and delighted observers, but independent, detached. Malory removes our world and substitutes his. The integrity of his conviction, his feeling, his imagination, is such that we return from him with difficulty to that smaller and meaner life which we have called normal. There is the same integrity in Malory’s use of English; his speech, his phras- ing, are as dignified as those of an epic, but entirely simple and sincere. He was not surpassed or equalled in English until, in 1549, the gravely simple diction and noble rhythms of the first Prayer Book were composed. Between him and it the tale of English writing, verse or prose, is a sorry one. There is no suavity, no simplicity, and no dignity in Hawes; he is hopelessly muscle-bound. There is no freedom in Barclay; although he has the wit to reach for novel forms, his touches of reality and independence are clamped down among didactic phrases. Skelton is but half free, medieval rather than humanistic, a lampooner and rebel more because he is unsuccessful than because he has ideas. George Cavendish too is but half free; with him, however, the division is between verse and prose, the former stiffly imitative, the latter honest, vigorous, alive—a real story told with a real voice. His life of his master Wolsey is almost the first of English biogra- phies, antedated only by More’s unfinished life of Richard III; and it has had few superiors in the four centuries since it was written. But while Cavendish was writ- ing it, in the group of versifying courtiers around Henry the Eighth the “mode” was supreme, whether in song or in translation. Wyatt, Surrey, Nevill, Morley, obey it, each in his own way; and although the two last-named are more woodenly subservient to pattern, the two greater men are fortunate partly because their pat- terns are fortunately chosen. In pure song, indeed, they are truly English, and truly poets. But no man rises above an original, above a standardized pattern, as Malory had, until Cavendish creates biography, until the Prayer Book is written, and until with Spenser, Shakespeare, and the King James version of the Bible, the freedom of English utterance is attained. Removal of the pressure of the stereotype does not restore at once the long- atrophied vision; from a hundred and fifty years’ denial of perceptual power, from protracted over-assimilation of a few facts, from the exhausting effect of overworked motives and words, a national literature does not recover at a bound. With the appearance of a foreign-bred Humanism among English scholars and in a small class of aristocratic poets, the Renaissance gets under way in Eng- land. As society settles, as education spreads, as intercourse grows freer, the new modes of expression find more favor. But earlier themes and tendencies last over; and it takes a long time for Englishmen to obtain control of rhythm and of structure, two lessons which Humanism could not teach them. Yet, slow as was the process of social readjustment and education, slow as was the assimilative power of the new public, England’s attainment of balance, in the GENERAL INTRODUCTION Sa Elizabethan age, was on all the higher level because the sequence of events which brought her there had been just what it had been. The defeat of the Armada was a spectacular success indeed, a poweiful stimulus to English patriotic pride and to the sense of national unity. But it came after a long series of lesser in- conspicuous successes in the economic field, after a definite rise in the average of English comfort and security in private life, after the assertion of English re- ligious self-control. The sense of unity and confidence derived from resistance to an invader had a more ample national basis on which to rest, because of pre- vious partial adjustments. _ The Armada success did not, like Agincourt, en- gender forces hostile to regular growth; it was a definite and healthy phase in England’s attainment of self-poise, partly because of the social and religious resettlement which preceded it. And so with literature. The various elements of the English change passed slowly and firmly into relation with one another. That challenge of the moral basis of life which follows on a change in social structure, that challenge of the social basis of life which accompanies a new view of morality, took effect each upon the other, and were expressed in new moulds of form. The English Renaissance is far more socially penetrative, more deeply felt on literature, more earnest and ethical than that of the Continent, because in England a bour- geois self-assertion which might, with the break-up of feudal inhibitions, have assumed a more arrogant and illiterate form, was reined in by both Humanism and the Protestant Reformation. It persisted, but it was modified. A politically homogeneous and articulate people and a national sense of conduct were growing alongside that revival of perception, that increase of experiencing power, which permitted a revival of expression. It is not surprising that the dominant literary form of this fusion and interaction should be the drama; for no other utter- ance is so definitely social, and none admits of such a variety of tones. Every vulgarity, every pedantry, every vice, every upleap of vigor, every dignity of Englishmen is poured into the alembic of Shakespeare. 38 ENGLISH VERSE SELECT REFERENCE LIST I The student will derive profit from Green’s Short History of the English People and from G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England, 1926; from H. W. C. Davis’ edition, Oxford, 1924, of Medieval England; from G. C. Coulton’s Chaucer’s England, and from Trevelyan’s England in the Age of Wycliffe; from H. S. Bennett’s The Pastons and their England, Cambridge, 1922; from Eileen Power’s Medieval English Nun- neries; from E. Male’s L’art réligieux de la fin du moyen-age en France, Paris, 1908, and from Male’s other work; from Ramsay’s Lancaster and York, Wylie’s Henry IV, and Cora L. Scofield’s Edward IV; from Vickers’ England in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1914; from Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters, Munich, 1924 (transl. London, 1924 as The Waning of the Middle Ages); from the Legacy of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1926. G. Le Bon, The Crowd, a Study of the Popular Mind, transl. London, 1896, from the French. Many reéditions. Th. Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, N. Y., 1899, G. Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, transl N. Y., 1903, from second French ed. G. Tarde, L’Opinion et la Foule, third ed., Paris, 1910. W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, N. Y., 1916. W. Lippmann, Public Opinion, N. Y., 1922. The Complaint to his Lady is printed in Skeat’s Oxford Chaucer, i :360. The Black Knight, see ed. by Skeat in vol. vii of the Oxford Chaucer. Walter’s Guiscard and Sigismonde, see Zupitza in Vierteljahrschrift fiir Kultur u. Litteratur der Renaissance, i:63-102 (1886). See diss. by Clarence Sherwood, Berlin, 1892. “How a Lover Praiseth his Lady,” see ModPhil 21 :379-395. The Flower and Leaf, the Assembly of Ladies, the Court of Love, La Belle Dame sans Merci, are included in Skeat vii as above. The Isle of Ladies, see diss. by Jane Sherzer, Berlin 1905. Hye Way to the Spyttelhous, by Robert Copland, is printed in Hazlitt’s Early Popular Poetry, 1866, vol. iv. Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages, ed. A. P. Newton, N. Y., 1926. Dawn of Modern Geography, C. R. Beazley, London, 3 vols., 1897, 1906. Mandeville’s Travels are ed. for EETS by Paul Hamelius, 2 vols., 1919, 1923. See also Sir George Warner’s ed. for the Roxburghe Club, 1889. Le Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory, Vida D. Scudder, London and N, Y., 1917. For Lydgate’s addition to the Brut, see Robinson in Harvard Studies v. Bokenam’s Mappula Anglie is printed by Horstmann in EnglStud 10. The Master of Game, by Edward duke of York, is ed. Baillie-Grohman, 1904 and 1909. Standard but special reference-works, such as Thorndike’s History of Magic or Kings- ford’s studies in the English Chronicles, will be found in the separate refer- ence lists of this volume. JOHN WALTON’S BOETEIUS-TRANSLATION The poem here discussed is in most of the manuscripts marked as by “Johannes Capellanus,” in one manuscript at least (the Phillipps) as by ‘“Ca- pellanus Johannes Tebaud alias Watyrbeche.” In the early and carefully- written volume belonging to Balliol College (A), the author’s name is given as “John Walton nuper canonicus de Oseneye”; and in the 1525 print of the poem an acrostic at the close not only names “Johannes Waltwnem” as author but states that his patroness was Elizabeth Berkeley. Nothing more is known of John Walton except that his work is definitely dated 1410 by a number of the MS-colophons; Elizabeth Berkeley was probably daughter to that Thomas lord Berkeley who employed Trevisa to translate various encyclopedic works, and wife to Richard earl of Warwick, himself the reputed author of a little courtly verse, and Lydgate’s patron for the Pedigree of Henry the Sixth. In such case, it was their daughter the countess of Shrewsbury who commanded of Lydgate his Guy of Warwick; and the family, with its protégés Trevisa, Walton, and Lydgate, make one of the literary “groups” of the fifteenth century. Elizabeth countess of Warwick married before May, 1399, and died in 1423. See pp. 459-60 here. Already Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry (see ed. by Hazlitt iii:39-40) had identified Walton as the translator of this work; but the vagueness of “Johannes Capellanus” led various students to attribute it to John Lydgate. Such is the statement of Casley’s 1734 catalogue of the Royal MSS and of the 1838 catalogue of the Durham Cathedral MSS; also of Peiper in his 1871 ed. of Boethius’ Consolation, and of Manitius in his 1911 history of medieval Latin literature included in the Handbuch der klassischen Altertums- kunde, ix, 2. The impossibility of Lydgate’s authorship is clear, however, to any student of the matter; the direct definite advance of the translator’s mind, the absence of digression and of rime tags, the comparative freedom of the verse from eccentric lines, are completely non-Lydgatian. Indeed, although Warton dismissed our versifier summarily as “contributing no degree of improvement to our poetry or our phraseology,” this Boethius-translation deserves more at- tention and credit than it has received. It was of course a mistake on Walton’s part, as ten Brink remarked, to force the whole work into verse,—a greater tactical error than Chaucer’s reduction of the whole to prose. For thereby is lost the element of variety, the change of key from reflective to lyrical, so defi- nitely sought by Boethius; and the use of verse for the whole imposes on the major portion of the work a key more appropriate to the minor portion. A some- what similar ill-judgment may be seen in the French translation of Boccaccio’s Fall of Princes, cf. p. 151 below. The work which Walton here translates is one of the most potent of the Middle Ages. It exerted upon. West-European letters an influence comparable only with that of the Roman de la Rose seven centuries later. Its author, An- icius Manlius Torquatus Severinus Boethius, was born about 480 A.D., and was executed by the emperor Theodoric in 525. Of good family, he was raised to the consular dignity in 510, and was holding important government office when his remonstrances against the imperial policy brought upon him the suspicion and [39] 40 JOHN WALTON’S wrath of Theodoric. He was thrown into prison, and there put to death. During a life of great political activity and responsibility, he had found time to translate several texts of Aristotle, with commentaries, which were the main source of later medieval knowledge of Aristotle; he also wrote on logic, and drew up manuals of arithmetic, music, geometry, etc., which were the standard for cen- turies. But the best-known and most influential of Boethius’ writings was his last, the De Consolatione Philosophiae, written while he lay in prison, and in the knowledge of approaching death. It is an interview, in Latin prose inter- spersed with verse, between the prisoner and Philosophy, who appears to him as a marvellous female figure, and discusses with him the secrets of the universe. The Consolatio not only made a profound impression on the medieval mind, but has remained interesting to modern students, as the many translations of it show. For the French versions, etc., see Stewart as below; English renditions are still more numerous. The earliest of these is by King Alfred, latest edition by Sedgefield, Oxford, 1899; to this is appended the alliterating Old Eng. ver- sion of the metres of Boethius. Chaucer’s translation is entirely in prose, but there is a stanzaic rendering by him of one metre, the “Former Age.” Of his first book there is a reshaping which exists in one MS (see note on A 26 of our text) and which may have been known to Walton when he speaks of “diverse men’? who had preceded him. Later than Walton are:—George Colvile in 1556, ed. Bax, London, 1897; Queen Elizabeth in 1593, ed. EETS 1899, with appendix containing nine metres translated by Sir Thomas Challoner ?1563; transl. by John Bracegirdle, 1603-09, in hexameter etc., specimen printed by Fliigel in Anglia, 14:499; by “I. T.” in 1609, prose and verse, printed in the Loeb Library Boethius, 1918; the metres of books i and ii by Henry Vaughan in his Olor Tscanus, 1651; by “S. E. M.”, London, 1654; by H. Conningesby, verse, 1695; by anon., prose and verse, Oxford, 1674; by Richard lord Preston, prose and verse, 1695; by William Causton, prose and verse, London 1730; by Philip Rid- path, prose and verse, London, 1785; by R. Duncan, Edinburgh, 1789; an anon. transl. of the metres, London, 1792; by H. R. James, prose and verse, London, 1897, 1906; by W. V. Cooper, prose, London, 1902. Walton’s notion of a translator’s duty, as stated in his preface, is more than the usual patristic one of keeping the sense, whatever may happen to the word. He attempts to be true to the word also, so far as metrical exigencies permit; and although his “liftings” from Chaucer are frequent, he is often fortunate in his phrasing, and quite as likely to render the Latin correctly as was his great predecessor. His work, despite its borrowings, has vigor and honesty. And the handling of English rhythm by Walton is so much better than by either Hoc- cleve or Lydgate that he, with the translator of Palladius and the translator of Charles d’Orléans, deserves especial attention from students of the English metre written in this bewildered period. He is frequently driven by his verse-form to pad, but avoids the barren formulae to which Lydgate is so prone. He can be dignified without being floridly rhetorical; his most deliberate ornament is allit- eration, which he employs e.g. in the first metre of the first book. The care and intelligence with which he worked can be well seen in the difficult discussion of “‘prescience” in book v, prose 4. Chaucer’s cautious progress through this material was successful, but Walton’s restatement of it in verse was a real BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION 41 task, even with the Chaucerian text before his eyes. The mentality which could acconiplish this is of an order quite other than the mentality of Hoccleve or of Lydgate; and we may note the scanty use of Boethius by Lydgate (see p. 185 below). Whether or not Walton knew the versifying of Boethius in Troilus’ soliloquy, Book iv of Chaucer’s poem, is a point as yet uninvestigated. Walton’s translation runs to more than 7,500 lines, in eight-line stanzas to the close of book iii, and thereafter in sevens, with a special prologue of Walton’s own composition marking the change. Four stanzas at the close return to the original construction. Manuscripts containing the work are fairly numerous. Schtimmer as below lists fourteen, viz.:—In the British Museum, Royal 18 A xiii, Harley 43, Harley 44, and Sloane 554; in the Bodleian, Rawlinson poetry 151 and Bodley e Museo 53; in Oxford colleges, Balliol 316 A and 316 B, New College 319, and Trinity College 21; in Cambridge, Gg iv, 18 of the University Library. Other MSS in Schiimmer’s list are Lincoln Cathedral A 4, 11, Durham Cathedral v ii, 15, and the MS formerly Phillipps 1099, now (1927) in the hands of Dr. Rosenbach, the New York collector and dealer. To this list Prof. Carleton Brown, in his Register of Middle English Religious Verse, adds five MSS :—the former Chet- wode MS, now McClean 184 of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge; the So- ciety of Antiquaries 134; Christ Church Oxford 151; Bodl. Douce 100; and St. John’s College Cambridge 196. A Copenhagen MS is mentioned by J. H. Wylie in Athen. 1892, i: 600. Walton’s poem was printed in 1525 at Tavistock Monastery in Devonshire (where was situate the second press established in England) by Thomas Rychard, at the request of Master Robert Langdon; the book is exceedingly rare. Brief extracts from the translation are given by Todd in his Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer p. xxxii (2 stanzas only); by Blades in his Caxton, ii:68; by Wiilker in his Altenglisches Lesebuch, 11 :56-59; by Stewart as below; by Skeat in his Oxford Chaucer, ii:xvi-xviii; by Fligel, Neuengl. Lesebuch, p. 99. Cos- sack and Schiimmer, as below, print much larger portions of the text. On Wal- ton see Warton’s HistEngPoetry, iii:39-40 of Hazlitt’s edition. For my text I have used the MS Royal 18 A xiii of the British Museum, a volume used also by Wilker, by Skeat, and by Schtimmer; some variant read- ings are given as stated, usually from the MS Balliol College 316 A. The Royal volume is on vellum, of 114 leaves, 914 by 614 inches, in a very neat square conventional hand, with careful capitals to stanzas, and marginal markings of metres and proses, etc. There is no other work in the volume. The Balliol MS contains, besides Walton, two short hymns; it also is on vellum, of 108 folios, with a colophon giving Walton’s name and ecclesiastical status,—whereas the Royal’s colophon has the usual “per Capellanum Johannem.” These and other MSS are described by Schiimmer as below. SELECT REFERENCE LIST II Doyle, Official Baronage of England, 3 vols., London, 1886. Warwick, Richard de Beauchamp earl of; for a virelay by him see PMLA 22:597. Moore, Samuel, Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk ca. 1450, ibid. 27 :188-207, 28 :79-105. 42 JOHN WALTON’S Stewart, H. F., Boethius, an Essay, London, 1871. Cossack, H., Ueber die altenglische metrische Bearbeitung von Boethius, de Conso- latione Philosophiae. Leipzig diss., 1889, pp. 69. Cossack uses the 1525 print for his analysis, which is of book i only; he proves the use of Chaucer by Walton. Fehlauer, Fr., Die englischen Uebersetzungen von Boethius’ de Consolatione Phil- osophiae, Berlin, 1909. Part pubd. as diss., K6nigsberg, 1908. Schiimmer, K., John Waltons metrische Uebersetzung der Consolatio Philosophiae. Un- tersuchung des handschriftlichen Verhaltnisses und Probe eines kritischen Textes, Bonner Studien 1914. Part pubd. as diss., 1912. Schiimmer’s “textproben” are book i entire, the first three sections of book iii and a selection from its latter half, the prologue to books iv and v, and part of book v. All in all, he gives over a third of the work. His apparatus of variants is printed below each stanza, and in his introd. he constructs a genealogical tree of MSS. Hittmair, R., Das Zeitwort “do” in Chaucers Prosa, Leipzig, 1923, diss., has a com- parison of the Boece with Alfred, Walton, Colville, and Queen Elizabeth. The Bodleian MS Auct. F 3, 5, which contains a prose transl. of book i of the Consolatio, is now marked Bodley 2684; see the Summary Catalogue i:492, and Liddell in Academy 1896 1:199. Recent studies on Chaucer’s translation are by B. L. Jefferson, Princeton, diss., 1917, and by Koch in Anglia, 46:1-51. [PREFACE anp PROLOGUE: METRE 1, PROSE 1] Insuffishaunce of cunnyng & of wyt Defaut of langage & of eloquence Pis work fro me schuld haue wibholden Zit Bot pat yowre hest hab done me violence Pat nedis most I do my diligence 5 In thing bat passith myn abilite Beseching to youre noble excellence Pat be your help it may amended be - a This subtile matire of boecius Heere in this book of consolacion I0 So hye it is so hard and curius fful (fer) abouen myn estimacion Pat it be noght be my translacion Defouled ne corrupt to god I praye So help me wib his inspiracion 15 Pat is of wisdom bothe lok & keye 3 As fro be text bat I ne vary noght But kepe be sentence in his trewe entent And wordes eke als neigh as may be broght Where lawe of metir is noght resistent 20 This mater whiche pat is so excellent 12. Royal reads fair; Balliol 316 A, fer. 24. Insertion from Balliol A And passeth both my cunnyng & my myght So saue it lord in bi gouernement Pat kannest reforme all bing (vn) to right 4 I haue herd spek & sumwhat haue y seyne 25 Of diuerse men bat woundir subtyllye In metir sum & sum in prose pleyne This book translated haue full suffishaunt- lye In to englissh tonge word for word wel neye Bot I most vse be wittes pat I haue 30 Pogh y may noght do so yit noght for thye With helpe of god pe sentence schale I saue 5 To chaucer pat is floure of rethoryk In englisshe tong & excellent poete This wot I wel no bing may I do lyk 35 Pogh so bat I of makynge entyrmete And gower bat so craitily dop trete 33. Balliol reads was flour, etc. BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: A 43 As in his book of moralite Pogh I to peym in makyng am vnmete 3it most I schewe it forth pat is in me 40 6 Noght lyketh me to labowr ne to muse Vppon bese olde poysees derk ffor crystes feith suche ping schuld refuse Witnes vppon Ierom pe holy clerk Hit schold not ben a _ cristenmannes werk 45 Tho fals goddes names to renewe ffor he pat hab reseyued cristes merk If he do so to crist he is vntrewe 7 Of bo pat crist in heuene blis schall Suche manere werkes schold ben set on side 50 ffor certaynly it nedeb noght at all To (whette) now be dartes of cupide. Ne for to bidde bat Venus be oure gide So bat we may oure foule lustes wynne On aunter lest be same on vs betide As dede be same venus for hyre synne And certayn I haue tasted wonder lyte As of be welles of calliope No wonder bough I sympilly endite Yet will I not vnto tessiphone 60 Ne to allecto ne to megare Besechin after craft of eloquence But pray pat god of his benignyte My spirit enspire wip his influence 9 So bat in schenschip & confusion 65 Of all this foule worldly wrecchidnesse He help me in this occupacion In honour of pat suffrayn blisfulnesse And eke in reuerence of youre worthi- nesse This simple work as for an obseruance I schall begynne after my sympelnesse In wil to do your seruice & plesance EXPLECIT PREFACIO TRANSLATORIS INCIPIT PROLOGUS EIUSDEM SUPER LIBRUM BOECII 10 The while bat Rome was reignyng in hir floures And of be world held all pe monarchie Sche was gouerned penne be emper- oures 75 49. Balliol A, blisse. 52. Royal wete, Balliol whette. And was renounned wondir nobelye Til pride had set baire hertes vppon hye Penne gan thei to vsen cruelte And regne by rigour & by tyrannye In sore oppressioun of be commynalte 11 For right as pouert causeth sobirnesse And febilnesse enforseth continence Right so prosperite & sikernesse Pe moder (is) of vice & necligence And pouer also causeth insolence 85 And often honour changep goode pewes Pere is none mo parelouse pestilence Pan hyhe estates gyffen vnto schrewes WZ Of which was nero oon pe principall Pat suche manere of tyrannye began 90 pough he bare dyademe imperiall Yit was hym selfe a verry cursed man So cruelly he began to reigne ban He slowh his modir & his maistir both And myche he dide pat tellen I ne can Who so hab hit rede he (knowyth) well pe sothe 96 13 The cheef of holychirche he slowh also Seynt Paule & petir both vppon a day And after beym full many ober mo And of hym self it is I dar wel say 100 pat paule writeth pus it is no nay And seith now is be forme of wickednesse And figure right of Antechristus lay In whom schall been all manere cursed- nesse 14 For pei bat trwly techeth cristes lore 105 To maken men forletten of peire vice Antecrist will pursue peym perfore And all bis prechyng setten at no prise So was he gifen to lustes & delice In what desire bat comen to his poght He wolde it done wip outen more avise ffor no bing hereof spare wolde he noght 15 And he bat wolde agayn his vices speke Conseilyng hym his lustes to refreyne Wip outen more anon he wolde be wreke 115 78. Balliol for to wvsen, etc. Beside stanza 11, in margin, is Nota per exemplum, 84. Royal omits is; inserted from Balliol A. 93. began; Balliol gan. 96. Balliol as here; Royal knowt. 110. Balliol bt what desire pt come unto, etc. 44 JOHN WALTON’S He wolde him put in torment & in peyne And he bat wolde his lustes out wip seyne He was but dede if pat he wolde appere ffor suche a cause Boecius was slayn Of whom this processe techeb after heere 120 16 The yeere of crist fyue hondred & fiftene Whan anastasius was Emperour Boecius be same of whom I mene In Rome he was a nobie senatour Bot bo in manere of a conque(r)our 125 Theodoricus regned in ytayle And rome he held as heed & gouernour He hadde it wonne by conquest & bataile 17 For anastasius was noght ilyke Ne noght so strong of meyne atte lest He was consentant pat theodorik Scholde regne in Rome & holde it atte hest And he wolde holde hym seluen in be este He seide it was accordant to his hele And for his ese in sothe he chese it meste 135 ffor romayns ben ful perelus wt to dele 18 This kyng of rome pan theodorik Was full of malice & of cursidnesse And for causa he was an heretyk Pe cristen peple gan he sore to oppresse 140 Boecius wib his besynesse Wibstode hym euere sparing none offence And hym presente ful often tyme expresse Reuersed (his) vnlawefull iuggementis 19 He spared noght be helbe of his estate But euer he spake ayayn his tyrannye Wherfor be kyng hym hadde sore in hate And hym exciled in to Lumbardie To prison in pe citee of Pavie Where ynne he was for a recreacion 150 Be twyne hym selphe & philosophie He wrote bis book of consolacion 117 out; Balliol ought. 125. So Balliol; Royal in a manere. 132. Balliol at his heste. 141. MS Phillipps reads with all his, etc. 144. So Balliol; Royal is. 150. The MSS read was or he was; the print reads as. 20 In prose & metre enterchaungyngly Wib wordes set in colour wonder wele Of rethoryk endited craftily 155 And schewyng bat bis welbis temporele As not to be desired noght a dele Ne worldly meschief noping for to drede Enforsyng vs be resoun naturale To vertu fully for to taken hede 160 21 When anastasius had made his fyne As tyme of age in to his deth him drewe Pan after hym was emperour Iustyne A noble knyght a feithful & a trewe ffor cristes lawes wonder wel he knewe 165 And keped hem as a verry crysten man And heretikes faste he gan pursewe Pat arrians were cleped than 22 His letters in to Rome pan he sent fforto destroyen all pat heresye 170 And fully gaf hym in comaundement Pat bei schulde putte hem out of com panye Theodoricus took bis wonder hyhe for he hym self was oonly oon of tho This message he repelled vtterlye 175 And made a vow it schold not stande so 23 And swore but if be arrians moste Have fully pees & graunted hem ageyn He nold not leuen oon in all pe coste Of cristen feith bat he ne scholde be slayn 180 And pus he bade pe messangers sayn Pat if he wold wt arrians stryve Seie to be Emperour in wordes playn Of cristen wil I leue noon on lyue 24 To constantinopill he sent anone 185 Of senatowres whiche bat hym self leste And so among(es) ober pope Ione And bad paim laboren for baire avne beste 157. Balliol beim ought to be, etc.; Harley 44 Areen, etc. 171. Balliol yaf hem. 174. Cambr. and New Coll. read holly oon. 175. One 1 of repelled is inserted with caret; Balliol repeled. 178. MS New Coll. pes ygraunted. 187. So Balliol; Royal among. 188. Balliol, owne beste. BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: A 45 And rufullyche bei maden pbaire requeste Pat lIustyne schold pis maundement relees 190 ffor cristen might noght be in reste But if he graunted arrians pees 25 The emperour his malice vnderstode Benyngly he graunted hap hur bone And wel he boghte pat (pis) was as gode 195 Pat mater for to cessen til efte sone And beter mighte it afterward be done Be good avise of wyser ordinaunce Pe arriens so he lete alone To vsen forth baire olde gouernaunce 26 These messagers to pe kynges pay Retourned noght so hastely ageyn As he desired at assigned day Wherfor in hert he had gret dysdeyne And Boece pat lay in prisoun & in peyne 205 Exiled in be citee of Pavie In myleyne ban he made him to be sleyne In Pavie been his bones sikerlye 27 And whan these messagers at be laste Returned were in hert he gan to brenne 210 And pope Ioone in prison ban he caste All fer in to be citee of Ravenne And made him closid in a narwe denne Where he ne mighte torne him selfe ne wende 214 And sothe to seyn he went neuer benne Bot of his lyfe right bere he made an ende 28 Also be worthi noble semachus Pat was a man full grounded all in grace Pat as in vertu was heroycus Pere left not suche an oper as he was 220 Wib outen cause surfete or trespace At Ravenne eke he slowe hym cruellye And afterward in bat same place De next yere he deyde sodeynlye 29 And as seynt Gregor doth hym self write 225 As his diologe makeb mencioun Pere was pat tyme an holy heremyte 191. Balliol, be cristene. 195. Insertion from Balliol. 203. Royal assigned a day; cp. line 125. As he was in his contemplacioun He sawe theodorik in visioun By twine Symachus an(d) pope Iohn Right as a beef to his dampnacioun How he was led and after pt anon 30 In be yle of vicane was he casten benne Pat full is of a fury flaumbe of hell Per in alwey in peynes forto brenne 235 And wt pe foule fendes forto dwell ffor tyrantes pat so fers been & fell Suche reward is arayed for paire mede I saye yow but as olde bookes tell Nowe to my purpose tyme is pat I spede 240 31 And euery lord or lady what (ye) be Or clerk pat likep for to rede pis Beseching lowly wib humylite Support where I haue seyde amys Correcte only bere bat nedeful is 245 If worde & sentence be noght as hit scholde My self I am vnsuffishaunt Iwys ffor if I couthe haue beter done I wolde EXPLICIT PROLOGUS INCIPIT LIBER BOECII DE CONSOLACIONE PHILOSOPHIE: METRUM PRIMUM Carmina qui quondam studio florente peregi Flebiles heu mestos . cogor inire modos Allas I wrecche bat whilon was in welthe And lusty songes vsid for to write 250 Nowe am y set (in) sorowes & vnselthe Wt mornyng nowe my myrbe I most respite Lo redyng muses techep me to endite (5) Of wo wt wepyng wetep bai my face Thus hath disese distryed all my delite And broght my blis & my bonechife all bace 33 And (pbogh) pat I (with) myschef nowe be mete Pat false fortune lourith bus on me (10) No drede fro me ne myghte bese muses lete Me for to sewe in myn aduersite 260 My ioyes pei were all in my iolite 241. Royal he; most MSS ye. 246. Balliol or sentence. 251. Balliol in; Royal omits. 253. redyng; see Notes. 257. Royal writes poght, witht. 46 JOHN WALTON’S Of youthe that was so gladsom & so grene Nowe bai solacen my drery destine (15) And in myn age my confort nowe bei bene 34 Unwarly age cometh on me hast(e)ly Hyeng on me for harme pat | haue had And sorow his eld hap hoten to be ney Hore heris on myn hede to rathe ben sprad (20) All toome of blode my body waxep bad Myn ampty skyn begynneth to tremble & quake 270 I knowe no cause wher of I scholde be glade But socourlese pus am I all forsake 35 A deth of men a blisful bing it were (25) If he wolde spare beym in baire lusty- nesse And (com) to bem pat ben of heuy chere 275 When pai him call to slaken paire dis- tresse But out allas howe dull & deef is he Wryeng awey fro wrecches when bei clepe (30) And werneth penne wt wonder cruelnesse Pe eyen forto close bat waile & wepe 36 Bot while fortune vnfeithfull & vntrewe Of lusty lyf was to me fauorabill (34) ffull sodainly myn hede down he drewe Pe carefull oure of deth vnmerciabill But nowe pat sche so chaunging & vnstable 285 Hath turned vnto me hire cloudi face This wrecchid lyf pat is vnconfortable Wyll drawe along & tarieth nowe allas 37 Wher to (ye) frendes made ye your awaunt (41) So often tymes of my felicite 290 This worldly welthe is noght perseueraunt Ne neuere abidyng in stabilite ffor he bat fallip out of his degre Ye knowen wel pat stable was he noght Ne he stood neuer in full prosperite Pat in to meschef is so lowe Ibroght 265, 275, 278. Royal writes hastly, cometh, wryng. 285. Royal sche is so, etc. 289. Royal and Balliol be. 38 [Prose 1] In mornyng bus I made my complaynt And for to write my fyngres gan I folde ffor drerynesse I wax all febill & feynt Pat of my lyf almost noping I tolde 300 But vpward atte laste I gan beholde In sothe y seie so faier a creature I couthe hire noght discriuen bogh I wolde So semely was hire schap & hir feture 39 Sche was so wonder reuerent of hiere chere 305 Hire colour eke so lyuely and so bright Hire eyen brend semyng as for clere (11) Passing full fer abouen mamis sight As bogh sche were full fresshe & clene of might As sche had ben full yongly of corage Yit semed (she) to euery worldly wyght Pat she was ouerpassid mamis age 40 ’ Hire stature was of doutful Iugement Somtyme bus of comune mannes meet And somtyme was hire stature so (extent) 315 Pat wt hire heed sche semed heuenes beet And ober while so hihe hire heed sche geet (21) Sche persed heuene & might no more be seyne So pat we muste be sight of hire forlete And all oure lokyng after was in veyne 41 Hire clothis wroght were of bredes smale But subtile craft of mater perdurable And wip hire hondes by hire awne tale Sche had hem wroght I trowe it be no fable Pe beaute of hem was full commend- able 325 But dusk pei were forleten as for elde As ymages bat in smook had stonden stable (31) Pat ben not wasche ne wyped not but selde 309. Balliol And pauh, etc. 311. Balliol she, Royal he. 314. Royal inserts ly after comune, with caret; the ink is different. 315. See Notes. 322. Several MSS read By subtile, etc. BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: A 47 42 And in (be) hem bynepben made sche had So as I couthe it knowe a grekysshe - P - And in be bordure al abouen I rad = 331 And pere also sche had made a -T- And so by twyne pe lettres might I see Like a laddire what pat evire it mende Wher on men myght all wey fro gre to gre Se ffro bare byneben vpward evire ascende 43 Neuerpeles sum men by violence (41) Had kyt pis cloth & pecis born awey Suche as bei mighte wt outen reuerence And dide bere wt as was vnto theier pay This creature of whom I gan yov say 341 In hire right hond smale bookes were A septir also of full riche araye In certeyn in hire oper hand sche bere 44 And when (pis) womman sawe bese muses bere 345 Vnto my beddes side approchen neye (50) Enditing wordes to my wepyng chere She gan to loke vppon hem feruentlye Who hab sche seide let in pis companye Pus wt hire song bis seek man _ to plese 350 Pat noping helpeth hym of his maladie But rather doth hym greuaunce & disese 45 Lo pese it been sche seide pat folkes feden Wt swete venim of corrupcioun And tendre hertes maken forto bleden Wibe thornes of beire full affeccioun Pei sleyn be worpi fruytes of resoun (61) And only bryngen siknesse in vsage This is be kynde of beire condicioun And not at all be seknesse to aswage 360 46 Yif ye sche seide wt youre daliaunce Had fro me drawe sum foole vnprofitable 345. Balliol pis, Royal bese. ffull lesse it wolde haue done me dis- plesaunce I myght haue sustened pat as sufferable ffor whi & suche a foole pat is vnable 365 Mai not be harmed of my bysenesse (70) Bot beie pat euer in studie hath stonden stable Schuld not be founden wip youre foly- nesse 47 Bot goo ye filthes out of my presence Youre swetnesse wolde hym bryng at an ende 370 I schall him saue wt salue of my science Pat schall be more confort to his kynde And bus bis companye away gan wende And bitterly abasched of beire blame Schewyng in sothe pe abyt of beire mynde Hangyng doon to grounde paire heed for schame 376 48 I than pat neigh for teres sawh right noght (81) Merueiled myche what myght bis wom- man be I wondred also gretely in my boght Pat so imperviall of a(u)ctorite 380 Sche made pat meigne smertly for to flee I was abasched and heng myn hede to grounde What sche wold done or after seie to me Pan I abood & held me still a stound 49 Unto my bed ban gan sche me neighe nere 385 And on be corner doun hire self sche sette (90) And sadly gan byholde vppon my chere Pat so was wt teres al bywette And right bus sche bygan wip oute lette Compleynyng on my perturbacioun 390 ffor cause of meschef wher wib I was mette Of me sche made pis lamentacioun 385. Balliol has not me. 48 JOHN WALTON’S [BOOK II METRE 5: THE FORMER AGE] Full wonder blisseful was bat raber age When mortal men couthe holde hymself payed To fede beym self wt oute suche outer- age Wib mete pat trewe feeldes haue arrayed Wipb acorne paire hunger was alayed 5 And so bei couthe sese paire talent Thei had yit no queynt craft assayed As clarry for to make ne pyment 2 To deen purpure couthe bei noght bebynke The white flees wyp venym tyryen 10 Pe rennyng ryuer yaf hem lusty drynke And holsom sleep bei took vpon be grene The pynes pat so full of braunches been Pat was baire hous to kepe vnder schade The see to kerue no schippes were bere seen 15 Per was no man pat marchaundise made 3 Thay liked not to sailen vp & doun But kepe hem self where bei weren bred Tho was ful huscht be cruel clarioun ffor eger hate per was no blood Isched 20 Ne ber wt was non armour yit bebled ffor in bat tyme who durst haue be so wood Suche bitter woundes bat he nold haue dred Wip outen reward forto lese his blood 4 I wold oure tyme myght lerne certanly 25 And pise maneres alwey wt vs dwelle But loue of hauyng brennep feruently More fersere ban be verray fuyre of helle Allas who was pat man bat wold him melle This gold & gemmes pat were keuered pus 30 Pat first began to myne I can not telle Bot bat he fond a parelous precious [BOOK II METRE 7] Who bat supposen will vnwyttyly In renoun soueren ioyes for to be And late hym look vp in to be heuene on hye And so be holde vpon pat large cuntre And after lat hym to berpe see So narwe it is bat soore it schal hym schame Pat in so litell space of quantite He may it not fulfille wt his fame 2 Allas what aylen fierce men & proute To leften vp paire nekkes so in vayn 10 This mortal yok whiche bat ye bere aboute Schal payse it downe vnto be grounde agayn Thogh pat youre resoun passe many a playn And so be spred aboute be many tung Pat of your lynage hyhe & souereyn 15 In grete honour be fame of yow be sprung 2. Balliol hemselfe. 25. Balliol turne certeynly. 3 Yit deth depayseth all youre hyhe renoun Neiber greet ne lytell wil he none knowe Bot bothe in lyke he layth hire hedes doun And euene he makyth be hyhe wt be lowe 20 Lo where ben nowe pe bones as we trowe Of brutus & fabricious be trewe Of sterne Catoun be fame is ouerblowe And maked now in lettres bot a fewe 4 And yit po men we (knoweth) not at all 25 Thogh pat we knowe peyre fayre names so ffor pei be deth as euery ober schall Out of be sight be passed & agoo ffor wib bis lyf when pat ye passe fro ffor to be knowen pen ye ben vnable 30 Youre worpi fame may no more doo But fleyen aboute veyne & variable 25. Royal reads knowt; see ante, A 96. BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: D 49 5 And if ye wene to drawe your lyf on long As be a lytell wynde of worldly fame As fooles ben ye done yow seluen wrong 35 ffor when o cruell deth yow schall atame Al your renoum schal turnen in to grame Whiche pat ye han purchased so wt pride ffor after bat be styntyng of your fame Ye must ben another deth abyde 40 [BOOK III METRE 12] Full blisfull is pat man pt may behold pe bright welle of verray blisiulnesse And well is hym pt may hym self vnfolde ffro bondes of bis worldly wrecchidnesse The poet Orpheus wip heuynesse 5 His wyfes deth hap (weiled) wepyngly And wip his songes full of drerynesse Made wodes for to renne wonderly 2 He made stremis stonden & abyde Pe hynde fered not of houndes fell 10 Sche lete be lyon lien by here syde The hare also ne dred noght a dell To see be hound hit lyked hym so well To here be songes bat so lusty were And boldly thei dorste to gidres dwell Pat nevire a best had of ober feere 3 And when pe loue gan brennen in his brest Of erudice moste hote & feruently His song bat had so many a wylde best So meke made to lyuen comynly 20 They myghte hym not conforten vtterly Of hyhe goddes gan he to compleyn And seide bei deden wt hym cruelly That bei sent hym noght his wyf ageyn 4 He went ban to houses infernall 25 And faste his strenges bere dressed he And sowned out be swete songes all Pat he had tasted of be welles thre While bat his modres dere Calliope Pat is goddesse & chief of eloquence 30 To wordes pat moste piteous myght be As sorowe had taght hym be experience 5 And loue also pat doubleth heuynesse To helle began he his compleynt to make Askyng mercy bere wip lawnesse 35 6. Royal veiled, Balliol wayled. 9. Royal strennis. At pilke lordes of be schades blake And cerberus pat woned was to wake Wib hedes thre & helle yates kepe So hadden hym pese newe songes take The swetnesse made hym forto falle on slepe 40 6 The fuyres pat ben vengoures of synne And surfetoures smyteb so wt feere ffor heuynesse pt pis man was ynne They gan to mourne & weped many a tere Ne bo be swift wheele had no powere 45 To torne about be heed of (Yxion) Ne tantalus for thrist all bogh he were fforpyned longe watire wolde he none 7 The gryp pat ete be mawe of tycius And tyred on hit longe tyme be fore 50 This song to hym was so delicius He left it of & tyred it no more And when bat orpheus had mourned sore Than seide be Iuge of helle peynes strong Pyte me hap quyt I will restore 55 This man (his) wyf bus wonnen wt his song. Bot with a lawe pis gift will I restreyne Pat vnto he this bondes haue forsake If he beholde vpon his wyf ageyne His wyf fro hym eft sone will we take 60 Bot who to louers may a lawe make ffor loue is rathir to hym self a lawe When he was neygh out of be bondes blake He turned hym & erudice he sawe 9 Allas he lost & left his wif be hynde This fable lo to yow perteyneth right ffor ye bat wolde lyften vp your mynde In to be hye blisfull souereyn light 41. fuyres; so Balliol. Read furyes. 46. Royal and Balliol, yaon, 56. Royal writes is. 50 JOHN WALTON’S If ye eftsone turne doun youre sight In to pis foule wrecchid erthly dell 70 Lo all bat evire your labour hab you dight Ye loose it when ye loken in to hell EXPLICIT LIBER TERCIUS BOECII DE CONSOLACIONE PHILOSOPHIE PREFACIO TRANSLATORIS IN LIBRUM QUARTUM & QUINTUM [Walton here inserts a preface, nine stanzas of seven lines, lyrical] O hye & riche tresour of science And wisdom whiche in god eternally Conteyned is so pat his iugementes Ne mowe not be enserched certanly Neither be wey be knowen vtterly 5 Be whiche pis wonder worldes gouer- naunce He kepith in suche a certayn ordy- naunce Who wist his wit when he pis world began Or who was he pt was his conseillour When no thyng was who was pt gaf hym pan 10 To whom he is in daunger as dettour Of hym is all for he is creatour Be him it is bat all bing Is susteyned In hym is all bing kyndly conteyned 3 Lo of so hye a matre for to trete 15 As after bis myn auctowr doth pursue This wote I well my wyttes ben vnmete The sentence forto saue (in) metre trewe And not forthi I may it not eschewe Ye ben be cause why I mote don pus 20 And schewe my seluen here presumptu- ous 4 Of hap of fortune & of destine Pat marred hap full many a mannes mynde Supposyng bat oure kyndely liberte Thus to & fro must all wey turne & wende 25 So pt oure werkes to a certan ende Constreyned ben wher pt we will or noght So pat none ober wise bei may be wroght 5 To speken of divine purveaunce Pt all bing knowith or it be bygonne 30 No worldly wight may haue pat suff- saunce With all be wit & clergie pat bei konne 18, 36. Balliol &c. have in, we; Royal omits. No more pan perce the myddes of be sonne As wip be litell vigour of baire sight 34 Wel myche more it passeth mannes myght 6 And bat (we) stonden in oure arbitrye As fully set in verray liberte So bat we mowe chesen wilfully Bothe goode & euel bothe wel & wo to be And yit pat god in his eternyte 40 So knoweth all pt evire schall betide Who can pis two compownen & devide It is not elles bot pat oure desire Wolde kyndely bat conseyt comprehende Right as we seen a litel flaumb of fuyre 45 How scharp it makeb it seluen to ascende And not forpi it failleb of his ende And is full fer from theder pat it scholde So may we penken or tell(en) what we wolde 8 Bot fuyre right of movynge of nature 50 Behold how scharp it makep it & light And all so ferforth as it may endure How it enforceth forto stye vp right Bot we wolde haue not elles but a sight And knowe pe height of goddes priuete And will oure self all wey in erthe be 9 To be pat art the welle of sapience Almyghti lord this labour I commyt Thogh I be fer fro craft of eloquence Enforce pou my connyng & my wit 60 This mater forto treten so pat it Be to bi honour & to pi plesaunce So take it lord into thi gouernaunce INCIPIT LIBER QUARTUS [Prose 1] And when (my) maistresse philosophie Kepyng all wey hire sobirnesse & hire chere 65 64. Royal omits my; supplied from Balliol. BOETHIUS-TRANSLATION: E Bl This song had songen wonder lustilye So pat full sad all wey hire wordes were I gan to speke & seide in pis manere Noght all forgeten myn oppressioun I made hire make an interrupcioun 70 O souereigne gidoresse of verrey light Youre resouns ben so myghti & so fyne Anon to pis & open to my sight As in baire (speculacioun) devine Whiche as ye seide for angir & for pyne 75 fforgeten was (& falle) out of my poght Bot yit beforn (byknowen) were pei not Bot pis is most my cause of heuynesse So good a gouernour as hauen we How bere may be so myche wikked- nesse 80 And suffred so vnponysched to be How wonderful is pis now deme ye And this wel more encresep my doloures Pat wickednesse regnep in his floures And now not onely vertu wanteb mede Bot felons han defouled it & schent 86 And in be stede of synne & coursidhede Now vertu bereth peyne & (ponysche- ment ) Bot in be rewme of god omnipotent Pat seeth all bis & onely good he will I may compleyne & wonder wel be skyll Than seide sche bus a wonder ping it were Abhomynable & verry menstruouse If as bou feynest & supposest here In a so well disposed lordes house 95 If vesselles bat ben riche & preciouse Schuld so despised & defouled be And foule vessell be made in preciouste Bot sikerly sche seide it is noght so ffor if tho thynges stondeth formely 100 That we before bis haue consented to Now be be help of souereyn god on hye Of whom here he speketh (ententifly) Thow schalt here after fully knowe & seen Pat good folkes all wey myghti ben —_105 And wicked folkes vnmyghti bere ageyne Ne mede may fro vertu noght disseucre 74, 88, 103. Royal writes spectaculacioun, poyn- yschement, entiflye. 76. Royal writes was for & all out, etc.; 77, it writes we knowen. Readings from Balliol. And pat bere is no vice wipouten peyne And good folke of welbe faillen nevire And wicked folk ben infortunat euere And myche pyng pat to byn hertes ese Availen schall and pi compleynt (appese) Now here beforn I haue be schewed expresse As pou hast herd & seen it plenerly Whiche is be forme of verrey blisful- nesse 115 And where pou schalt it fynde verrayly Lo all bis ouerpassen now will I Whiche pat we moste over passe nede And to my purpose faste I schall me spede Unto thi home I schall pe schewe a wey 120 And pennes schall I pycche into pi mynde Pat it arisen into height may Al heuynesse left & put behynde My path I will pe lede be be hand And cariage my self I schal be fynde 125 Al hole & sound into byn owne land [iv, Metre 1] Full swyft been my fetheres in paire flight Pat stieng into hyhe heuene ariseth And when pei be into a mynde Ipight Pe erthe ben it hatep & despiseth 130 And settep all at (noght) as he deviseth De speere of eyre he passeth all aboue Behynde his bak he seeth be cloudes houe That mynde also be spere of fuyre trans- cendeth That is so hoot be movynge of be heuene 135 And to pe sterred places he ascendep Thurgh out be speres of planetes seuene And wt be sonne his wey he ioyneb euene So at be laste he meteb wt be old Saturnus whos effectes ben so cold 140 So is pis sotill mynde made a knyght Of god pat is be souereyn sterre clere And (so) be cercle of be sterres bright Pe whiche ye may behold on nyghtes here Wt his recours he passeth all in fere 145 And in theire speres be holden wele Pe manere of beire movynge euery dele 112, 131. Royal reads aplese, not. 143. Royal omits so. 52 JOHN WALTON And well he wot bat goddes ben bai not Pe hyest heuen he leueth hym behynde Till bat he haue araysed vp his poght 150 Anone to hym pat auctour is of kynde This worpi lyght he putteb in his mynde Pat of bis round world is lord & kyng Pat kepeth & gouerne} all ping The swyft cours of sterres meveth he Iuge of binges bright & souereyn Hym self stedfaste evire in oo degre If bis wey may reduce be ageyn Vnto pi place pou schalt pi self seyn Lo here it is pat I so longe haue soght 160 My cuntre & til now I knewe it noght Fro hennes I come & in pis place right I thynke to (abyden) & to dwell And if pe list to cast a doun pi sight Into pis foule derk erthly selle 165 Be holden myght bou bere tyrantes felle Whiche bat of wrecches ben Idrede full wyde Out of this lond exiled for bere pryde 163. Royal writes byden. 166. Royal be halden, ete. THOMAS HOCCLEVE Of the English followers of Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lyd- gate are best known to modern students. Both were grown men at the time of Chaucer’s death in 1400, and Hoccleve at least knew his master personally ; but there is no evidence that they knew of each other’s work or of each other’s existence. Their lives ran in different grooves. The country-born Lydgate entered a monastery while still a boy, and so far as we know spent his life thus. Hoccleve was a Londoner by adoption if not by birth, became a clerk in the Privy Seal office when he was about twenty, and there apparently remained. From his many autobiographical allusions it seems that he was a tavern-haunter and a waster of money, that after being disappointed of a clerical post in the Church he drifted into marriage, that he suffered under a long period of mental illness or madness, and that he turned, verses in hand, from one noble patron or government official to another in the hope of money- reward to eke out the irregular payments of the Crown. He was probably born about 1368; for he gives his age as fifty-three in a poem which terms Gloucester the Lieutenant of the realm; this was in 1421-22, while Henry V was still in France. He dates his translation of the De Regimine Principum, or Regement of Princes, made for Henry V, in 1411-12, and there says that he had been for twenty-four years at his Privy Seal desk; he must accordingly have entered the office when about twenty. An allusion to Prince Edward’s tutor, in a poem addressed to Edward’s father the Duke of York, may date that poem 1446-48, when the prince was four to six years old. Thereafter we know no more of Hoc- cleve, nor have we any record of pension-payments to him for many years pre- ceding. An entry in the Close Rolls, pointed out by Professor Hulbert, shows that Richard II granted a corrody, or maintenance chargeable on a church, to Hoccleve in 1395; this the poet transferred in the first year of Henry the Fourth. The earliest of his poems to which we can assign a date is the Letter of Cupid, translated from the French in 1402, as the writer tells us. In 1406, probably, he wrote La Male Régle, a series of self-reproaches for his irregular life, ending with a petition to the lord treasurer to pay him his overdue pension ; this annuity had been granted him by Henry IV soon after accession. In 1411-12 Hoccleve compiled the Regement of Princes, from several sources; and in 1415 he wrote a severely pious reprimand to the heretic Oldcastle. Perhaps ten years later, in the Complaint and the Dialogue with a Friend, he talks of an inter- vening illness, says he is fifty-three years old, and mentions the return of Glou- cester from France (1421). For the duke’s pleasure Hoccleve then translates and appends to the Dialogue the Gesta Romanorum story of the Innocent Persecuted Wife,—Jereslaus’ wife. His translation of the tractate Learn to Die, from Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, also (probably) planned for Gloucester, and a second Gesta-story similarly appended, are later work. Both pairs of poems, and the Complaint which serves as introduction to the earlier, were transcribed in a sequence and sent to the Countess of Westmoreland in a copy which still exists at Durham. If this Countess was the widowed daughter of John of Gaunt, then living at the same castle of Sheriff Hutton which was later the scene of Skelton’s Garland of Laurel, she was the woman to whom Sir Thomas Morton in 1431 be- [53] 54. THOMAS HOCCLEVE queathed a copy of Gower’s English poem, and the same woman who after her nephew Henry V’s death applied to the Council for the return of books she had lent him. Other poems by Hoccleve are brief, and are either devotional,—including the Mother of God so long ascribed to Chaucer,—or occasional verse often of the begging-letter type. All in all, he has left about 13,000 lines of verse, written in stanzas of seven or eight and a few of nine lines, and including four roundels. Neither this amount of productivity nor Chaucer’s 34,000 lines of verse (ex- clusive of the Romaunt-translation), looms very large beside Lydgate’s ca.140,000 lines ; but, it is needless to say, there are various factors to be considered in making a comparison. Both Hoccleve’s production and his range of production are very much smaller than those of Lydgate. There are in his work no long romantic-epic narratives, no lives of saints, no allegories, no tapestry or fresco-poems, no courtly love-addresses, no beast-fables, no mummings. The religious-didactic is Hoc- cleve’s theme whenever he is not autobiographic; but his constant tendency to the autobiographical is the most interesting of his qualities. La Male Régle is a deliberate and frank self-confession, used as lengthy prelude to a begging- letter. The two-long tasks undertaken for Henry V and for Gloucester are each preluded by a lively piece of dialogue in explanation of their origin. In the one case it is a friend, in the other a wise old beggar, who receives Hoccleve’s laments over his muddled life and counsels him how to proceed. Where Lydgate would compose a prologue in imitation of Chaucer or in praise of the original he was translating, Hoccleve plunges awkwardly but vitally in another method. His dialogue is real dialogue, not alternating set speeches. He is limited enough in his handling; there is no setting for his two speakers, such as Chaucer or Henryson would have painted in; the voices, though lively in tone, are bodiless. And as soon as they cease, and the business of Jereslaus’ Wife or the Regement of Princes begins, Hoccleve drops into the stereotype of his period. In the prolonged didactics of the Regement of Princes there are several moments, how- ever, where the name of Chaucer breaks that spell of somnolence. Hoccleve goes out of his way to allude to his beloved master; and in one of these three short but deeply-feeling passages he says that he has had Chaucer’s likeness inserted, in order that men may not lose remembrance of him. A portrait of Chaucer does indeed appear at that point in a few MSS of the Regement, and is, with the Host’s teasing chaff in the headlink to Sir Thopas, our only real clue to Chaucer’s personal appearance. These mentions of Chaucer, the requests to a patron or superior for money, and the religious character of many of the shorter poems, are the lines on which Hoccleve and Lydgate can be compared as regards theme. And the student who puts Hoccleve’s begging-letters beside Lydgate’s pleas to Gloucester, Hoccleve’s language about Chaucer beside Lydgate’s far more numerous allusions, Hoccleve’s autobiographical disclosures beside Lydgate’s Testament, Hoccleve’s religious lyric beside Lydgate’s, will perceive two very different men. The trappings of convention lie much more heavily on Lydgate, who has no such restless urge to . talk of himself, no such human directness of approach to other human beings, as Hoccleve had. MHoccleve is always livelier and simpler than Lydgate; and when he speaks of Chaucer it is with a true affection and regret that have sweet- ened his own memory for the after-world. He has lived more really than has THOMAS HOCCLEVE 55 Lydgate, and the mixture in him of piety and cheap raffishness makes him a more genuine creature. Saintsbury calls him a “crimeless Villon”; and it might repay a student to follow out the likenesses and differences between the Englishman and the Frenchman. In their piety the difference is very marked; for Hoccleve is as sincerely pious as is the monk Lydgate. He cannot indeed rise to as true a passion of love for Christ crucified as Lydgate sometimes can; but on the other hand, there are in the small bulk of Hoccleve’s verse no such depths of wordy inanity as too often occur in Lydgate’s religious poetry. We may plead for Lydgate the compulsion under which he worked, a compulsion from which Hoc- cleve was free. But the vacuity remains. On the technical side of the two men’s work there is also a marked difference. Both men were followers of Chaucer; and Hoccleve, who knew his master per- sonally, says that Chaucer “fayn wolde han me taght, But I was dul and lerned lite or naght.’’ His verse shows, indeed, less of Chaucer metrically than does the verse of Lydgate. Hoccleve manages pentameter badly, and is insensitive to the -weave of stressed and unstressed syllables, so long as their number is constant at ten. Very many lines run as do these: Pat me yeuest any othir than thee Of thy soule meekly to him confesse We sholde no meryt of our feith haue And as that the preest hir soules norice 215/212 To the taast of your detestable errour 217 /293 i:5/165 i i i i Of the myghty Prince of famous honour 1:49 /3 i i i i i 711/94 713/142 Ageyn thorsday next & it nat delaye :66 /56 And shoop me him to offende no more :67 /16 Yit thy deeth gat of the feend the maistrie 268 /52 On the crois was thy skin in to blood died :69 /68 Pat our soules pat the feend waytith ay :71/126 Lydgate, on the contrary, is aware of certain rhythmic variants in Chaucer, adopts them, and abuses them. The headless line and the line brokenbacked, or short an unaccented syllable at the verse-pause, are a staple with him. He could find the former at least in Chaucer, and may have built the latter by analogy: but their occurrence is infrequent in Hoccleve, so far as we can yet say. The repetition of a single line-type by Lydgate is as marked as is Hoccleve’s un- awareness of line-type. Neither man understood Chaucer’s rhythm, but they mis- understand very differently. They differ also in their management of the English language; and here the advantage is so much with Hoccleve that we can surmise why Chaucer should have attempted to teach him. Hoccleve has nothing of Lydgate’s uncontrollable verbosity. He does not jumble finite verbs and participles; he does not overwork the ablative absolute ; he does not leave long sequences of clauses wandering with- out a principal verb; he does not repeat himself; he uses the minimum of padding and of rime-formulae; he sees where he is going, in narrative, and goes there. _ His syntax-control and his feeling for dialogue show that he had some story- telling faculty; and probably Chaucer recognized it. Hoccleve can toss dialogue back and forth through a stanza in swift exchange, breaking the line or over- running it as he chooses; he does not move in monotonous half-lines or dilute into entire stanzas as does Lydgate. 56 THOMAS HOCCLEVE But with this advantage over Lydgate in the normal movement of speech, in the more competent use of English for expression, there goes, in Hoccleve, a lack of the “high spots” that we can find in Lydgate. Despite Lydgate’s ver- bosity and tedium, there are more than a few strong lines in his work; see p. 81 here. But from Hoccleve it is not possible to glean such. He does say of his reckless habits that for many years ““Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf with me,” and that “Ther never yet stood wys man on my feet.” His lament for Chaucer is moving. But his sense-perceptions, his feeling for nature, his imagi- nation, are not developed even as much as are those of Lydgate. The few strik- ing bits that we can cite are autobiographical and personal. Nor does Hoccleve echo Chaucerian phrase to anything like the extent seen in Lydgate. This is partly, of course, because of his relative lack of the narration and description so definitely the business of Chaucer and of Lydgate. He alludes to the Wife of Bath in his Dialogue, line 694; and in a few passages he may de- rive from Chaucer rather than from Chaucer’s original; see the remark on a prudent workman’s method in Dialogue 638 ff., and cf. Troilus i:1065 ff.; or see the dictum in Dialogue 764-5, or the phrasing of the Regement of Princes 629. But there is no such evidence of Chaucer’s power over Hoccleve’s memory as is clear for Lydgate, despite Hoccleve’s strong personal feeling for his master. This may be in some measure due to the resistance of a lively egoist, which Hoc- cleve undoubtedly was; for his citations of any sort are a separate element in his work. He follows copy and cites copy, in his translations, but it is distinct from his own trend of thought; and although the religious emotion of many of his independent poems is deep, he turns more naturally toward himself than toward literature. His choice of works to translate also shows a mind less literary than prac- tical and moralistic; and he had no body of patrons whose larger curiosity about books sent him afield in letters. His connection with Humphrey of Gloucester was slighter than was that of Lydgate. That some of Hoccleve’s work was popular we might argue from the number of copies of the Regement of Princes; but we must recollect that the subject was popular, by whomsoever treated, and that Hoccleve is not mentioned with Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate, by following generations. William Browne, in the seventeenth century, did indeed say of him :—‘‘There are few such swaines as he Now a dayes for harmony,’—but this critical judgment has not been endorsed by readers before or since. What recommends Hoccleve to us is his deep and genuine respect for Chaucer, the candid, even if contrite, relish with which he talks about himself, and his direct commonsense handling of his work. He has no “aureate language,” no rhetorical colors; he is too honest to delay his advance about his business by playing with words, and too clearheaded not to see the way to state that business. If Chaucer tried to teach Hoccleve to write, it was because Chaucer saw in Hoccleve the pos- sibilities which are still to be seen. In studying him we study some one who was very little of a writer, but a good deal of a man. THOMAS HOCCLEVE 57 SELECT REFERENCE LIST AND BIBLIOGRAPHY III Manuscripts Of the Shorter Poems en masse: HM 111 of the Huntington Library, California, formerly Phillipps 8151. Described by L. Toulmin Smith in Anglia 5:20, and by G. Mason in his ed. of six poems from it in 1796. Contents printed EETS edition, vol. i, 1892. HM 744 of the same library, formerly Ashburnham Appendix cxxxiii. Contents, except Learn to Die, are printed EETS ed., ii, 1925. Its copy of the Legend of the Virgin was ed. for the Chaucer Soc. in 1902; see my Manual, p. 444. Durham Cathedral V iii,9. Texts printed EETS ed., vol. i. Egerton 615 of the Brit. Mus. Texts printed EETS ed., iii, 1897. Of Single Shorter Poems: The Letter of Cupid. Fairfax 16, Bodley 638, Tanner 346, Digby 181, Selden B 24, all of the Bodleian Library. In Univ. Libr. Cambr., Ff. i,6. In Durham Cathedral V ii, 13, a Troilus MS; this text is unpubd., uncollated, and unmentioned either by Skeat, vii: 217, or in my Manual, p. 434. In HM 744. A late copy is in the Bannatyne MS. The poem was once in Longleat 258; see my Manual, p. 434, and p. 103 here. The Mother of God. Selden B 24 of the Bodleian; HM 111 as above; Advocates Libr., Edin- burgh, 18, 2, 8. To Henry V, for money. Fairfax 16. Text of Phillipps 8151 is printed EETS i: 62. Of the “Series” of Linked Poems, i.e., Complaint, Dialogue, two Gesta Romanorum stories, Learn to Die. Bodley 221, of the Bodleian, has the Series, Lydgate’s Dance Macabre, and the Regement of Princes. Laud 735, of the same library, has the same poems. Selden supra 53, same library, has the Regement (impf.), Series, and Dance Macabre. The lost Coventry School MS (see my Manual, p. 354) contained the Regement, the Series, the Dance Macabre, etc. Digby 185, of the Bodl. Libr. has the Regement and the two tales from the Series. Royal 17 D vi, Brit. Mus., has the Regement and part of the Series. Bodl. Eng. poet. d 4 has fragments of the two Tales of the Series. The MS formerly Phillipps 8267 (present owner unknown) has fragments of the Complaint. Of the Regement of Princes (see also under “Series” above). Alone in the codex. Brit. Mus. Arundel 38, Harley 4866, Royal 17 C xiv, Royal 17 D xviii, Royal 17 D xix, Sloane 1212, Sloane 1825.—Univ. Libr. Cambr. Gg vi, 17, Hh iv, 11, Kk i, 3; Corp. Christi Coll. 496, Queen’s Coll. 12, St. John’s Coll. 223; McClean 185.—Bodl. Ashmole 40, Douce 158, Dugdale 45, Rawlinson poe- try 10; Rawl. poetry 168—Advocates Libr., Edinb., 19, 1, 11, and Edinburgh Univ. D. b. vi. 7—Lord Amherst’s MS, now owned by Wilfrid Merton of London. The Ashburnham (paper) MS, now owned by Quaritch. 58 THOMAS HOCCLEVE With various other works, not by Hoccleve. 3rit. Mus. Adds, 18632, Arundel 59, Phillipps 1099 (in hands of Rosenbach), Phillipps 8980, Trin. Coll. Cambr. R 3, 22. With various other works, not by Hoccleve. Brit. Mus. Harley 116, Harley 372, Harley 4826, Harley 7333 (dialogue only). Ellesmere 26 A 13, now Huntington (See JEGPh 9: 225 and MLNotes 25: 126). Soc. Antiquaries 134, McClean 182. In the Harvard University Library, MS Eng. 532 F, is the transcript made from Harley 4866 (and Royal 17 D xix) by W. H. Black in 1843, in preparation for his projected Percy Society edition of the Regement, never carried out. A page of Brit. Mus. Adds 18622 is reprod. in Garnett and Gosse’s English Literature i, to face p. 190, and is wrongly marked as from the Siege of Thebes, in the same MS. It is from the Regement of Princes. A page of HM 744 (then Ashburnham MS) is reprod. EETS ed. i, to face page xxviii. A page of Durham V iii, 9 is reprod. EETS ed. i, to face p. 242. Jbid., p. xlix, Fur- nivall decides against either the Ashburnham, the Durham, or the Phillips as an Hoccleve autograph. See also Kern’s Verslagen as below, p. 372. A page of Durham V ii, 13 is reprod. by Root, The Manuscripts of Chaucer’s Troilus Chaucer Soc. 1914, to face p. 12; description on p. 11. The Troilus is however in a hand different from that of the Hoccleve poem. Brit. Mus. Adds. 24062, a collection of Privy Seal documents, is in Hoccleve’s hand. Editions The standard edition of Hoccleve is pubd. by the EETS in 3 vols., i (1892), ii (1925), iii (1897). Vol. iii, ed. by Gollancz, is of 40 pages, and gives most of the con- tents of the then Ashburnham-Gollancz MS, now HM 744, including the 3 roundels already printed by Gollancz in Academy 1892 i: 542; the third of these is also printed EETS ed. i, page xxxviii foot. This vol. excludes the “Ash- burnham” copy of Learn to Die, because ‘fa good text” from the Durham MS is in 11:178. George Mason pubd. in 1796 a volume entitled “Poems by Thomas Hoccleve, never before printed.” These poems, six in number, were taken from the Askew- Phillipps MS, now Huntington 111, then in Mason’s possession. Mason’s texts were used by Morley and by Wiilker as below. The Letter of Cupid was printed with Chaucer’s works from 1532 to 1721; see my Manual p. 434. Urry’s 1721 text is repr. in Arber’s Engl. Garner iv: 54, in re- ed., iv: 13-31. The Fairfax MS text of the poem is printed EETS i:72 and Skeat vii: 217; the text of HM 744 is printed EETS ii: 20. The Mother of God was printed with Chaucer’s works from 1532 to 1866; see my Manual, p. 438. In EETS ed. it is printed 1:52, from the then Phillipps MS. The poem To the King—and the Knights of the Garter was printed with Chaucer’s works from 1532 to 1721; see my Manual, p. 459. It is printed EETS i: 41 and Skeat vii: 233 from HM 111, the former Phillipps MS. The tale of Jonathas, forming part of the “Series”, as above, was incorporated by William Browne into one of his Eclogues, and printed with his Shepheard’s Pipe in 1614, repr. in Hazlitt’s ed. of Browne, 1869. Browne in a note says that all Hoccleve’s works are “perfect in my hands.” He once owned MSS Durham THOMAS HOCCLEVE 59 V ii, 15 and 16 (Lydgate), Durham V iii, 9 (Hoccleve), Ashmole 40 (the Rege- ment of Princes), Ashmole 46 (Lydgate), Brit. Mus. Adds. 34360, Lansdowne 699, Stowe 952. The Regement of Princes, or De Regimine Principum, was printed by Thomas Wright, London, 1860, from Brit. Mus. Royal 17 D vi. It is in the EETS ed., vol. iii, from Harley 4866. An extract from the Laud text of the poem, stanzas 58-73, is printed by Furnivall in Queen Elizabeth’s Achademy, etc., EETS, pp. 105-8. The poem to the heretic Oldcastle, copied by R. James from an earlier text, was ed. by Grosart with James’ poems in 1880. It was printed from the then Phillips MS by L. Toulmin Smith in Anglia. 5:9-43; Furnivall in EETS ed: i, page xliii, notes four errors in her text. The poem is in EETS i:8, from HM 111. The story of the Virgin and her Sleeveless Garment was printed by the Chaucer Soc. 1902; see my Manual, p. 444. The poem is printed EETS ii:15, divided by the editor into two parts. In JEGPh 8:260 MacCracken prints, from MS Univ. Libr. Cambr. Kk i, 6, a religious poem in ten eight-line stanzas for which he suggests Hoccleve’s authorship. Extracts from Hoccleve are in:— Ward’s English Poets, i:124-28.—Skeat’s Specimens of English Lit. 1394-1579, pp. 13-22—Wiilker’s Altengl. Lesbuch, ii: 47-56—Morley’s Shorter Engl. Poems, pp. 57-64.—Manly’s Engl. Poetry 1170-1892, p. 47.—Neilson and Webster’s Chief British Poets, 199-207. Studies Aster, Das verhaltnis des altengl. gedichtes De Regimine Principum von Th. Hoccleve zu seinen Quellen. Leipzig diss., 1888. Buchtenkirch, Der syntaktische gebrauch des infinitivs in Occleve’s De Regimine Principum. Jena diss., 1889. Vollmer, Sprache und Reime des Londoners Hoccleve, in Anglia 21: 201 (1898). Bock, Studien zu Th. Hoccleve’s Werken. Munich diss., 1900, pp. 68. Haecker, Stiluntersuchungen zu Th. Hoccleve’s poetischen Werken. Marburg diss., 1914, pp. 104. J. H. Kern, Een en ander over Th. Hoccleve en zijn werken, Amsterdam, 1915; pp. 365- 390 of Verslagen en Mededelingen der Koninkl. Akad. vy. Wetenschappen, reeks 5, vol. i. ——Zum texte einiger dichtungen Th. Hoccleve, in Anglia 39: 389-494 (1910). Hoccleve’s Verszeile, in Anglia 40: 367-9. ——Date of Hoccleve’s Dialog, ibid., 370-73. Der Schreiber Offorde, ibid., 374. B. P. Kurtz, The Source of Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye, in ModLangNotes 38 :337 (1923). ——The Prose of Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye, ibid., 39: 56. —The Relation of Hoccleve’s Lerne to Dye to its Source, in PMLA 40: 252-75. Hoccleve is discussed:—Warton-Hazlitt, Hist. Eng. Poetry, iii: 42-7—Morley’s Engl. Writers, vi, chap. 5—ten Brink’s Hist. Eng. Lit., ii: 212-220.—Jusserand’s Lit. Hist. Eng. People, i: 501-3—Courthope’s Hist. Eng. Poetry, i: 333-40—Cambr. Hist. Eng. Lit., ii, chap. 8—Garnett and Gosse’s Engl. Lit., i:192-94.—Saints- bury’s Eng. Prosody, i: 231-4. 60 THOMAS HOCCLEVE To the comment upon Hoccleve’s verse in the EETS introd. add my paper in ModPhil 23:129 ff., on the Nine-Syllabled Pentameter Line in some Post-Chaucerian Manuscripts. Notes on Hoccleve’s Reg. Princes text are in MLReview 4: 235. The MS Huntington 111, formerly Phillipps 8151, was described by Lucy Toulmin Smith, Anglia 5:20-21, as a small octavo of 8% by 6% inches, containing 47 vellum leaves and bound in old dark leather stamped with the royal arms of England. It is said to have belonged to Prince Henry, son of James the First; since then, to Askew, G. Mason, Bishop Heber, and Sir Thomas Phillipps. It is a plain MS, with only two small colored initials, in a fifteenth-century hand but with headings in another and larger hand, probably contemporary. It contains 16 complete poems and a Complaint of the Virgin wrongly thrust in between two leaves of another poem; Tyrwhitt, whose letter to Mason is fastened inside the cover, suggests that this transfer was perhaps made to conceal the fact that the Complaint, once the first poem of the MS, is im- perfect at beginning. The codex is of careful and consistent orthography, and has some marks of punc- tuation which may be noted. These are of three sorts: the inverted semicolon, used apparently as a comma; the mark of interrogation, which is like ours but reversed; and a sign somewhat similar, but with a flattened curve and tipped very much down to the right. The first sign appears in Male Régle, end of line 17, in 319 after why; in 367 after stele; in To Carpenter, line 26, after is, and in To Bedford 14, 18, after | colours, mis. The second sign is in Male Régle 37, in To Somer 22. The third is in Male Régle 265 after A; Mason here printed Ah, Furnivall As. It is also in To Carpenter, end of line 24. For revision of the EETS texts of these poems with the MS I am indebted t the kindness of Capt. R. B. Haselden, Keeper of the Manuscripts in the Huntington Library, California. HOCCLEVE’S MALE REGLE [MS Huntington 111, fol. 16 verso] CY ENSUYT LA MALE REGLE DE T. HOCCLEUE 1 Of ioie / and ful of seekly heuynesse 15 O precious tresor inconparable Al poore of ese / & ryche of euel fare O ground & roote of prosperitee 3 O excellent richesse commendable porien alk, Peiecane be If bt thy fauour twynne from a wight Smal is his ese / & greet is his greuance Who may susteene thyn aduersitee 5 : What wight may him avante of worldly aaa / is lyf / thyn hate sleeth doum welthe Who may compleyne thy disseuerance 20 Bettre than I pt of myn ignorance Vn to seeknesse am knyt / thy mortel fo 2 Now can I knowe feeste fro penaunce And whil I was wt thee / kowde I nat so But if he fully stande in grace of thee Eerthely god / piler of lyf / thow helthe Whil thy power / and excellent vigour As was plesant vn to thy worthynesse Regned in me / & was my gouernour Than was I wel / tho felte I no duresse Tho farsid was I with hertes gladnesse And now my body empty is & bare 4 My grief and bisy smert cotidian 25 So me labouren & tormenten sore Pt what thow art now / wel remembre I can MALE REGLE 61 And what fruyt is in keepynge of thy lore Had I thy power knowen or this yore As now thy fo conpellith me to knowe 30 Nat sholde his lym han cleued to my gore For al his aart / ne han me broght thus lowe : But I haue herd men seye longe ago Prosperitee is blynd / & see ne may And verifie I can wel / it is so For I my self put haue it in assay Whan I was weel / kowde I considere it? nay But what / me longed aftir nouelrie As yeeres yonge yernen day by day And now my smert accusith my folie 40 6 Myn vnwar yowthe kneew nat what it wroghte This woot I wel / whan fro thee twynned shee But of hir ignorance hir self shee soghte And kneew nat bt shee dwellyng was wt thee For to a wight were it greet nycetee 45 His lord or freend wityngly for toffende Lest pt the weighte of his aduersitee The fool oppresse / & make of him an ende ; From hennes foorth wole I do reuerence Vn to thy name / & holde of thee in cheef 50 And werre make & sharp resistence Ageyn thy fo & myn pt cruel theef Pt vndir foote / me halt in mescheef So thow me to thy grace reconcyle O now thyn help / thy socour and releef 55 And I for ay / mis reule wole exyle 8 But thy mercy excede myn offense The keene assautes of thyn aduersarie Me wole oppresse with hir violence No wondir / thogh thow be to me con- trarie 60 My lustes blynde han causid thee to varie Fro me / thurgh my folie & inprudence Wherfore / I wrecche / curse may & warie The seed and fruyt of chyldly sapience 9 As for the more paart / youthe is rebel Vn to reson / & hatith hir doctryne Regnynge which /it may nat stande wel With yowthe / as fer as wit can ymagyne O yowthe / allas / why wilt thow nat enclyne And vn to reuled resoun bowe thee 70 Syn resoun is the verray streighte lyne Pt ledith folk / vn to felicitee 10 Ful seelde is seen / pt yowthe takith heede Of perils pt been likly for to fall For haue he take a purpos / bt moot neede 75 Been execut / no conseil wole he call His owne wit he deemeth best of all And foorth ther with / he renneth bry- dillees As he pt nat betwixt hony and gall Can iuge / ne the werre fro the pees 80 11 All othir mennes wittes he despisith They answeren no thyng to his entente His rakil wit only to him souffysith His hy presumpcioun nat list consente To doon as pt Salomon wroot & mente 85 Pt redde men by conseil for to werke Now youthe now / thow sore shalt repente Thy lightlees wittes dull of reson derke 12 My freendes seiden vn to me ful ofte My mis reule me cause wolde a fit 90 And redden me in esy wyse & softe A lyte and lyte to withdrawen it But pt nat mighte synke in to my wit So was the lust y rootid in myn herte And now I am so rype vn to my pit Pt scarsely I may it nat asterte 13 Who so cleer yen hath & can nat see Ful smal of ye auaillith the office / 4 Right so / syn reson youen is to me For to discerne a vertu from a vice 100 If I nat can with resoun me cheuice But wilfully fro reson me withdrawe Thogh I of hire haue no benefice No wondir / ne no fauour in hir lawe 14 Reson me bad / & redde as for the beste To ete and drynke in tyme attemprely But wilful youthe nat obeie leste Vn to pt reed / ne sette nat ther by I take haue of hem bothe outrageously 62 THOMAS HOCCLEVE And out of tyme / nat two yeer or three LTO But xxti wyntir past continuelly Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf wt me 15 The custume of my repleet abstinence My greedy mowth Receite of swich out- rage And hondes two / as woot my negli- gence 115 Thus han me gyded / & broght in seruage Of hire pt werreieth eucry age Seeknesse y meene riotoures whippe Habundantly bt paieth me my wage So bt me neithir daunce list ne skippe 16 The outward signe of Bachus & his lure Pt at his dore hangith day by day / Excitith folk / to taaste of his moisture So often / pt man can nat wel seyn nay For me I seye / I was enclyned ay 125 With outen daunger thidir for to hye me But if swich charge / vp on my bak lay That I moot it forbere / as for a tyme 17 Or but I were nakidly bystad By force of the penylees maladie 130 For thanne in herte kowde I nat be glad Ne lust had noon to Bachus hows to hie Fy lak of coyn / departith conpaignie And heuy purs with herte liberal Quenchith the thristy hete of hertes drie 135 Wher chynchy herte / hath ther of but smal 18 I dar nat telle / how pt the fressh repeir Of venus femel lusty children deere Pt so goodly / so shaply were & feir And so plesant of port & of maneere 740 And feede cowden al a world wt cheere And of atyr passyngly wel byseye At Poules heed me maden ofte appeere To talke of mirthe / & to disporte & pleye 19 Ther was sweet wyn ynow thurgh out the hous 145 And wafres thikke / for this conpaignie pt I spak of / been sumwhat likerous Where as they mowe a draght of wyn espie Sweete / and in wirkynge hoot for the maistrie To warme a stomak wt / ther of they dranke 150 To suffre hem paie had been no courtesie That charge I took / to wynne loue & thanke 20 Of loues aart / yit touchid I no deel I cowde nat / & eek it was no neede Had I a kus / I was content ful weel Bettre than I wolde han be wt the deede Ther on can I but smal it is no dreede Whan pt men speke of it in my presence For shame I wexe as reed as is the gleede Now wole I torne ageyn to my sen- tence 160 21 Of him pt hauntith tauerne of custume At shorte wordes / the profyt is this In double wyse / his bagge it shal con- sume And make his tonge speke of folk amis For in the cuppe / seelden fownden is 165 pt any wight his neigheburgh com- mendith Beholde & see / what auantage is his Pt god / his freend / & eek him self offendith 22 But oon auantage / in this cas I haue I was so ferd / with any man to fighte 170 Cloos kepte I me / no man durste I depraue But rownyngly / I spak no thyng on highte And yit my wil was good / if pt I mighte For lettynge of my manly cowardyse Pt ay of strokes impressid the wighte 17 So pt I durste medlen in no wyse 23 Wher was a gretter maister eek than y Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre yate Among the taverneres namely And Cookes / whan I cam / eerly or late 180 I pynchid nat at hem in myn acate But paied hem / as pt they axe wolde Wherfore I was the welcomere algate And for a verray gentil man y holde MALE REGLE 63 24 And if it happid on the Someres day Pt I thus at the tauerne hadde be Whan I departe sholde / & go my way Hoom to the priuee seel / so wowed me Hete & vnlust and superfluitee To walke vn to the brigge / & take a boot 190 Pt nat durste I contrarie hem all three But dide as pt they stired me / god woot 25 And in the wyntir / for the way was deep Vn to the brigge I dressid me also And ther the bootmen took vp on me keep 195 For they my riot kneewen fern ago Wt hem I was | tugged to and fro So wel was him / pt I wt wolde fare For riot paieth largely / eueremo He styntith neuere / til his purs be bare 200 26 Othir than maistir / callid was I neuere Among this meynee in myn audience Me thoghte / I was y maad a man for euere So tikelid me pt nyce reuerence Pt it me made larger of despense 205 Than pt I thoghte han been / o flaterie The guyse of thy traiterous diligence Is folk to mescheef haasten / & to hie 27 Al be it bt my yeeres be but yonge , Yit haue I seen in folk of hy degree How pt the venym of faueles tonge Hath mortified hir prosperitee And broght hem in so sharp aduersitee Pt it hir lyf hath also throwe a doun And yit ther can no man in this con- tree 215 Vnnethe eschue this confusioun 28 Many a seruant / yn to his lord seith Pt al the world spekith of him honour Whan the contrarie of bt / is sooth in feith And lightly leeued is this losengeour 220 His hony wordes / wrappid in errour Blyndly conceyued been / the more harm is O thow fauele of lesynges Auctour Causist al day / thy lord to fare amis / 29 Tho combreworldes clept been enchan- tours 22 In bookes / as pt I haue or this red That is to seye sotil deceyuou(r)s By whom the peple is mis gyed & led And with plesance so fostred and fed Pt they forgete hem self & can nat feele 230 The soothe of the condicion in hem bred No more / than hir wit were in hire heele 30 Who so pt list in the booke of nature Of beestes rede / ther in he may see If he take heede vn to the scripture Where it spekth of meermaides in the See How pt so inly mirie syngith shee Pt the shipman ther with fallith a sleepe And by hire aftir deuoured is he From al swich song is good men hem to keepe 240 31 Right so the feyned wordes of plesance Annoyen aftir / thogh they plese a tyme To hem pt been vnwyse of gouernance Lordes beeth waar / Let nat fauel yow lyme If pt yee been enuolupid in cryme 245 Yee may nat deeme / men speke of yow weel Thogh fauel peynte hir tale in prose or ryme Ful holsum is it / truste hire nat a deel 32 Holcote seith vp on the booke also Of sapience / as it can testifie 250 Whan pt Vlixes saillid to and fro By meermaides / this was his policie All eres of men of his compaignie With wex he stoppe leet / for pt they noght Hir song sholde heere / lest the armonye Hem mighte vn to swich deedly sleep han broght 33 And bond him self / vn to the shippes mast Lo thus hem all saued his prudence The wys man is of peril sore agast O flaterie o lurkyng pestilence 260 If sum man dide his cure & diligence To stoppe his eres fro thy poesie 64 THOMAS HOCCLEVE And nat wolde herkne a word of thy sentence Vn to his greef it were a remedie 34 A nay / al thogh thy tonge were ago Yit canst thow glose in contenance & cheere Thow supportist with lookes eueremo Thy lordes wordes in eche mateere Al thogh pt they a myte be to deere And thus thy gyse is priuee and ap- pert 270 With word and look / among our lordes heere Preferred be / thogh ther be no dissert 35 But whan the sobre / treewe & weel auysid Wt sad visage his lord enfourmeth pleyn How pt his gouernance is despysid Among the peple / & seith him as they seyn As man treewe oghte vn to his souereyn Conseillynge him amende his gouernance The lordes herte swellith for desdeyn And bit him voide blyue with mes- chaunce 280 36 Men setten nat by trouthe now adayes Men loue it nat / men wole it nat cherice And yit is trouthe best at all assayes Whan pt fals fauel soustenour of vice Nat wite shal how hire to cheuyce 285 Ful boldely shal trouthe hir heed vp bere Lordes lest fauel / yow fro wele tryce No lenger souffre hire nestlen in your ere Oo”, {Be as be may / no more of this as now But to my mis reule wole I refeere Wher as I was at ese weel ynow Or excesse vn to me leef was & deere And or I kneew his ernestful maneere My purs of coyn had resonable wone But now ther in can ther but scant ap- peere 295 Excesse hath ny exyled hem echone 38 The feend and excesse been conuertible As enditith to me my fantasie This is my skile / if it be admittible Excesse of mete & drynke is glotonye 300 Glotonye awakith malencolie Malencolie engendrith werre & stryf Stryf causith mortel hurt thurgh hir folie Thus may excesse reue a soule hir lyf 39 {No force of al this / go we now to wacche 305 By nightirtale / out of al mesure For as in pt / fynde kowde I no macche In al the priuee seel with me to endure And to the cuppe ay took I heede & cure For pt the drynke appall sholde noght But whan the pot emptid was of moisture To wake aftirward/cam nat in my thoght 40 But whan the cuppe had thus my neede sped And sumdel more than necessitee With repleet spirit wente I to my bed 315 And bathid ther in superfluitee But on the morn / was wight of no degree So looth as I / to twynne fro my cowche By aght I woot / abyde / let me see Of two / as looth / I am seur kowde I towche 320 41 I dar nat seyn Prentys and Arondel Me countrefete & in swich wach go ny me But often they hir bed louen so wel Pt of the day / it drawith ny the pryme Or they ryse vp / nat tell I can the tyme 325 Whan they to bedde goon / it is so late O helthe lord / thow seest hem in pt cryme And yit thee looth is / wt hem to debate 42 And why I not / it sit nat vn to me Pt mirour am of riot & excesse 330 To knowen of a goddes pryuetee But thus I imagyne / and thus I gesse Thow meeued art of tendre gentillesse Hem to forbere / and wilt hem nat chas- tyse For they in mirthe and vertuous glad- nesse 335 Lordes reconforten in sundry wyse 43 But to my purpos / syn bt my seeknesse As wel of purs as body hath refreyned Me fro Tauerne / & othir wantonnesse MALE REGLE 65 Among an heep / my name is now des- teyned 340 My greuous hurt ful litil is conpleyned But they the lak compleyne of my des- pense Allas bt euere knyt I was and cheyned To excesse / or him dide obedience 44 Despenses large enhaunce a mannes loos 345 Whil they endure / & whan they be for- bore His name is deed / men keepe hir mowthes cloos As nat a peny had he spent tofore My thank is qweynt / my purs his stuf hath lore And my Carkeis repleet with heuy- nesse 350 Be waar Hoccleue / I rede thee therfore And to a mene reule/thow thee dresse 45 Who so passynge mesure desyrith As pt witnessen olde Clerkes wyse Him self encombrith often sythe & myrith 355 And for thy let the mene thee souffyse If swich a conceit in thyn herte ryse As thy profyt may hyndre or thy renoun If it were execut in any wyse With manly resoun thriste thow it doun 46 Thy rentes annuel / as thow wel woost To scarse been greet costes to susteene And in thy cofre pardee is cold roost And of thy manuel labour as I weene Thy lucre is swich / pt it vnnethe is seene 365 Ne felt / of yiftes seye I eek the same And stele for the guerdoun is so keene Ne. darst thow nat / ne begge also for shame 47 Than wolde it seeme / bt thow borwid haast Mochil of bt bt thow haast thus de- spent 370 In outrage & excesse and verray waast Auyse thee / for what thyng pt is lent Of verray right / moot hoom ageyn be sent Thow ther in haast no perpetuitee Thy dettes paie / lest pt thow be shent And or pt thow ther to compellid be 48 Sum folk in this cas dreeden more offense Of man / for wyly wrenches of the lawe Than he dooth eithir god or conscience For by hem two he settith nat (an) hawe 380 If thy conceit be swich / thow it with- drawe I rede / and voide it clene out of thyn herte And first of god and syn of man haue awe Lest bt they bothe / make thee to smerte 49 Now lat this smert warnynge to thee be 385 And if thow maist heere aftir be releeued Of body and purs / so thow gye thee By wit / bt thow / no more thus be greeued What riot is / thow taasted haast and preeued The fyr / men seyn / he dreedith pt is brent 390 And if thow so do / thow art wel ymeeued Be now no lenger fool / by myn assent 50 Ey / what is me / pt to my self thus longe Clappid haue I / I trowe pt I raue A / nay / my poore purs / and peynes stronge 395 Han artid me speke as I spoken haue Who so him shapith mercy for to craue His lesson moot recorde in sundry wyse And whil my breeth may in my body waue To recorde it / vnnethe I may souffyse 51 §O god o helthe vn to thyn ordenance Weleful lord / meekly submitte I me I am contryt / & of ful repentance Pt euere I swymmed in swich nycetee As was displesaunt to thy deitee 405 Now kythe on me thy mercy & thy grace It sit a god been of his grace free Foryeue / & neuere wole I eft trespace 66 THOMAS HOCCLEVE 52 My body and purs been at ones seeke And for hem bothe / I to thyn hy noblesse As humblely as pt I can byseeke Wt herte vnfeyned / reewe on our dis- tresse Pitee haue of myn harmful heuynesse Releeue the repentant in disese Despende on me a drope of thy largesse 415 Right in this wyse/if it thee lyke & plese 53 ‘Lo lat my lord the Fourneval I preye My noble lord / bt now is tresoreer From thyn Hynesse haue a tokne or tweye To paie me pt due is for this yeer 420 Of my yeerly .x.li. in theschequeer Nat but for Michel terme bt was last I dar nat speke a word of ferneyeer So is my spirit symple and sore agast 54 I kepte nat to be seen inportune 425 In my pursuyte / I am ther to ful looth And yit bt gyse / ryf is and commune Among the peple now withouten ooth As the shamelees crauowr wole / it gooth For estaat real / can nat al day werne But poore shamefast man ofte is wroth Wherfore for to craue moot I lerne 55 ‘The prouerbe is / the doumb man no lond getith Who so nat spekith / & with neede is bete And thurgh arghnesse / his owne self forgetith 435 No wondir / thogh an othir him forgete Neede hath no lawe / as bt the Clerkes trete And thus to craue / artith me my neede And right wole eek pt I me entremete For pt I axe is due / as god me speede 440 56 And pt that due is / thy magnificence Shameth to werne / as pt I byleeue As I seide / reewe on myn impotence Dt likly am to sterue yit or eeue But if thow in this wyse me releeue 445 By coyn I gete may swich medecyne As may myn hurtes all pt me greeue Exyle cleene / & voide me of pyne [TO SOMER] [From the same MS, fol. 38 verso] CESTES BALADE & CHANCEON ENSUYANTES FEURENT FAITES A MON MEISTRE .H. SOMER QUANT IL ESTOIT SOU3TRESORER The Sonne wt his bemes of brightnesse To man so kyndly is & norisshynge Pt lakkyng it / day nere but dirknesse To day he yeueth his enlumynynge And causith al fruyt for to wexe & sprynge 5 Now syn pt sonne may so moche auaill And moost with Somer is his soiournynge That sesoun bou(n)teuous we wole assaill 2 Glad cheerid Somer / to your gouernaill And grace / we submitte al our willynge To whom yee freendly been / he may nat faill But he shall haue his resonable axynge Aftir your good lust be the sesonynge 421. Marginal gloss: annus ille fuit annus restric- tions annuitatium. Of our fruytes / this laste Mighelmesse The tyme of yeer was of our seed ynnynge I5 The lak of which / is our greet heuynesse 3 We truste vp on your freendly gentillesse Yee wole vs helpe / and been our sup- poaill Now yeue vs cause ageyn this cristemesse For to be glad / o lord / whethir our taill 20 Shal soone make vs with our shippes saill To port salut? if yow list / we may synge And elles moot vs bothe mourne & waill Til your fauour vs sende releeuynge 4 We your seruantes Hoccleue & Baillay 25 Hethe & Offorde yow beseeche & preye TO CARPENTER 67 Haasteth our heruest / as soone as yee may For fere of stormes / our wit is aweye Were our seed Inned / wel we mighten pleye And vs desporte / & synge / & make game And yit this rowndel shul we synge & seye In trust of yow / & honour of your name Somer pt rypest mannes sustenance With holsum hete of the Sonnes warm- nesse Al kynde of man thee holden is to blesse Ay thankid be thy freendly gouernance And thy fressh looke of mirthe & of gladnesse Somer &c. To heuy folke / of thee the remem- braunce Is salue & oynement to hir seeknesse For why we thus shul synge in Christe- messe Somer &c. [TO CARPENTER] [From the same MS, fol. 41] See heer my maister Carpenter I yow preye How many chalenges ageyn me be And I may nat deliure hem by no weye So me werreyeth coynes scarsetee That ny Cousin is to necessitee 5 For why vn to yow seeke I for refut Which pt of comfort am ny destitut 2 Tho men / whos names I aboue expresse Fayn wolden pt they and I euene were And so wolde I / god take I to wit- nesse 0 I woot wel I moot heere / or elles where Rekne of my dettes / & of hem answere Myn herte for the dreede of god & awe Fayn wolde it qwyte / & for constreynt of lawe Just above is, in margin, A de B & C de D, &c. See Notes. 6. Marginal gloss: Ceste balade feust tendrement considere & bonement execute. 3 But by my trouthe / nat wole it betyde 15 And therfore as faire as I can & may With aspen herte / I preye hem abyde And me respyte / to sum lenger day Some of hem grante / and some of hem seyn nay And I so sore ay dreede an aftir clap 20 That it me reueth many a sleep & nap 4 If pt it lykid / vn to your goodnesse To be betwixt (hem) and me swich a mene As pt I mighte kept be fro duresse Myn heuy thoghtes wolde it voide clene 25 As your good plesance is this thyng demene How wel pt yee doon / & how soone also I suffre may in qwenchynge of my wo Cest tout 68 THOMAS HOCCLEVE [THREE ROUNDELS] [MS Huntington 744] CY ENSUENT TROIS CHAUNCEONS yi LUNE CONPLEYNANTE A LA DAME MONNOIE & LAUTRE LA RESPONSE DELE A CELLUI QUI SE CONPLEYNT & LA TIERCE i LA COMMENDACION DE MA DAME I [ Compleynt] Wel may I pleyne on yow lady moneye Pt in the prison of your sharp scantnesse Souffren me bathe in wo and heuynesse And deynen nat of socour me purueye Whan pt I baar of your prison the keye Kepte I yow streite Nay God to witnesse Well may I I leet yow out / O now of your noblesse Seeth vn to me / in your deffaute I deye Well may I Yee saillen al to fer retowrne I preye Conforteth me ageyn this Cristemesse Elles I moot in right a feynt gladnesse Synge of yow thus & yow accuse & seye Well may I Ii II [La Response] Hoccleue / I wole / it to thee knowen be I lady moneie/of the world goddesse Pt haue al thyng vndir my buxumnesse Nat sette by thy pleynte risshes three Myn hy might haddest thow in no cheertee Whyle I was in thy slipir sikirnesse Hoccleue At instance of thyn excessif largesse Becam I of my body delauee Hoccleue And syn pt lordis grete obeien me Sholde I me dreede / of thy poor sym- plesse My golden heed akith for thy lewdnesse Go poore wrecche / who settith aght by thee Hoccleue Cest tout [La Commendacion de ma Dame] Of my lady wel me reioise I may Hir golden forheed is ful narw & smal Hir browes been lyk to dym reed coral And as the Ieet / hir yen glistren ay Hir bowgy cheekes been as softe as clay Wth large lowes and substancial Of my lady Hir nose / a pentice is pt it ne shal Reyne in her mowth / bogh shee vp rightes lay Of Hir mowth is nothyng scant / wt lippes gray Hir chin vnnethe / may be seen at al Hir comly body / shape as a foot bal And shee syngith / ful lyk a papelay Of Cest tout DIALOGUE WITH A FRIEND 69 HOCCLEVE’S DIALOGUE WITH A FRIEND [EXTRACT | The partially-linked set of poems and prose moralizations by Hoccleve, which I for convenience call a “Series,” opens with a Complaint in soliloquy, of 413 lines rime royal; with it is connected a following Dialogue, of 826 lines in the same stanza, which introduces the tale of Jereslaus’ Wife, from the Gesta Romanorum, of 952 lines similarly grouped. On this follow four stanzas of dialogue, and the prose moralization of the Tale which Hoccleve’s friend therein demands. Earlier, in the Dialogue itself, the friend who is counseling Hoccleve learns from him that he is pledged to execute a piece of work for the duke of Gloucester, which is long overdue; the friend suggests something lighter than Hoccleve had had in mind, something to appease women, who have been angered by Hoccleve’s translation of the Letter of Cupid. An ‘Innocent Persecuted Wife” story is accordingly told by the poet, a story closely allied to Chaucer’s tale of Constance; but the rendition of “Learn to Die” which next follows (with- out connection) in the MSS of the “Series,” may be the work originally planned for Gloucester. It, and a prose comment, are bound by another bit of dialogue with the same friend to a second narrative translated from the Gesta Romanorum, also with appended moralization ; this closes the “Series.” Our extract is taken from the second link of the “Series,” the Dialogue: it opens with Hoccleve’s protest, in two stanzas, that he is quite capable of re- suming composition after his long illness, and has no intention of overworking himself as his friend fears. The friend has the next three stanzas and two lines more; Hoccleve replies, and not only stanzas but lines are occasionally divided between the two in the animated dialogue which follows. A similar dialogue- method of introducing his work is employed by Hoccleve as preface to the Rege- ment of Princes. The student will observe here the careful use of Thomas and of freend by the different speakers, for clearness. The MS from which I print, Selden supra 53 of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, is described p. 124 here. Freend I not medle of materis greete Ther to not strecche may myn intellecte I neuere yit was brent with studies hete 500 Let no man holde me therynne suspecte If I not ligtly / may cacche the effecte Of thing in wiche / laboure I me purpose A deu my studie / anoon my book I close By stirtis / whanne that a fresshe lust me taketh Wole I me bisie now and now a lite But whanne my lust dulleth & aslaketh I stinte wole / and no lenger write And parde frende / that may not hindre a mite As that it semeth to my symple avis 570 Iugeth youre silfe / ye bene prudent & wys Siker Thomas / if thou do in suche wise As thou seist / I am ful wel content That thou vppon the take that emprise Wiche that thou hast purposid and y ment Un to that ende geue I myn assent Goo thou ther to / in ihesu cristis name And as thou hast me seide/do thou the same I am sure that thi disposicioun Is suche / that thou maist more take on honde 520 Than I first wende in myn opinioun In many foold / thankid be geddis sonde Do forth in goddis name / and not ne wonde To make and write / what thing that thee list That I not er knewe / is nowe to me wist 70 THOMAS HOCCLEVE And of 00 thing / nowe wel I me remem- bre Whi thou purposist in this book trauaile I trowe that in the moneth of Septembre Nowe last or not fer from it / it is no faile No force of the time / it shal not auaile 530 To my matere / ne hindre or lette Thou seidest / of a book thou were in dette Vn to my lorde / that nowe is lieutenant Mi lorde of Gloucestre / was it not so Yis sothly freend / and as by couenant He shulde han had it many a day a go But seeknesse and vnlust / and othir mo Han bene the causis of impediment Thomas / thanne this book hast thou to him ment Siker freend ye ful trewe is youre demynge 540 ffor him it is / that I this book shal make As blyue as that I herde of his comynge ffro ffrance / I penne and ynke gan to take And my spirit I maade to a wake That longe lurkid hath in ydelnesse ffor any suche labour and besinesse But of some othir thing / fain trete I wolde Mi noble lordis herte / ther with to glade And therto deepe I bounden am and holde On suche mater / by him that me made 550 Wolde I bistowe many a balade Wiste I what / good freend / telle on what is best Me for to make / and folowe am I prest Next oure lege lorde oure kyng victori- ous In al this wide worlde / lorde is ther noone Vn to me so good ne so gracious And hath bene suche / yeeris ful manie oone God yelde it him / as sad as any stoone His herte is sette / and not chaunge can ffro me his humble seruant and his man 560 For him I thougte han _ translatid ( Vegece) Wiche tretith of the art of Chiualrie But I see his Knygthod so encresce That no thing my labour shulde edifie ffor he that art / wel can for the maistrie Bygonde he preued hath his worthinesse And amonge other / Chirburgh to wit- nesse This worthi Prince laie bifore that holde Wiche was ful stronge at sege many aday And thens for to departe hath he not wolde 570 But knygtly there abood / vppon his pray Til he by force it wan / it is no nay Duke herry that so worthy was and good ffolowith this Prince / as wel in dede as blood Or he to Chirborwe cam / in iourneiing Of Costantin he wan the cloos and yle ffor wich / laud and honour & bi preis- ing Rewarden him / and quiten him his wyle Thoug he biforn that had a worthi stile Yit of noble rennoun is that encrees 580 He is a famous Prince / and that is doute- lees For to reherce or telle in special Euery act that his swerde / in steel wroot there And many a nother place / I woot not al And thoug euery act come had to myn eere 585 To expresse hem / my spirit wolde han fere Lest I his thanke par chaunce migt abregge Thorug vnkunnynge / if I hem shulde alegge But this I seie / he called is Humfrey Conueniently as that it semeth me 590 ffor this conceit is in myn herte alweie Batallous Mars / in his natiuite Vn to that name / of verrey specialte Titlid him / makinge him ther by prom- esse That strecche he shulde un to hie prowesse DIALOGUE WITH A FRIEND 71 For humfrey / as vn to myn intellect Man make I shal / in englissh is to seie And that biheest / hath taken trewe effect As the comune fame / can biwreie Who so his worthi knygthod / can weie 600 Duely in hise conceitis balaunce Ynowe hath / whereof his rennoun en- haunce To cronicle hise actis / were a good dede ffor thei ensaumple migt and encorage fful many a man / for to taken hede How for to gouerne hem in the vsage Of armes / it is a greet auauntage A man bifore him / to haue a mirrour Therynne to see the path vn to honour O lorde / whanne he cam to the seege of Roon 610 ffro Chirborwe / whether fere or coward- ise So ny the wallis / made him for to goon Of the town / as he dide I not suffice To telle yow / in howe knygtly a wise He loggid him there / and how worthily He bar him / what / he is al knygt sothly Nowe good frende / shoue at the cart I yow preie What thing may I make vn to his plesaunce With outen youre reede / noot I what to seie O / no parde Thomas / 0 no ascaunce 620 No certein freend / as nowe no cheuis- aunce Can I youre counseil is to me holsum As I truste in yow ministrith me sum Wel Thomas / trowest thou his hie noblesse Not rekke / what mater that it be That thou shalt make of no freend as I gesse So that it be mater of honeste Thomas and thanne I wole avise me ffor who so reed and counseil geue shal May not on heed / forthe renne ther with al 630 And that to so noble a Prince namely So excellent / worthy and honourable Shal haue / nedith good a vise sothly That it may be plesaunt and agreable To his noblesse / it is not couenable To write to a prince so famous But it be good mater and vertuous \ Thow woost wel / who shal an hous edifie Gooth not ther to with oute avisement If he be wys for with his mental ye 640 first is it seen / purposid / cast and ment Howe it shal wrougt be / ellis al is shent Certis for defaute of good forsigte Mis tiden thingis / that wel bitiden migte This may be vn to thee / in thi makinge A good mirrour / thou wilt not haste I trowe Vn to thy penne / and ther with wirche heedlinge Or thou avised be wel / and wel knowe What thow shalt write / o Thomas / manie a throwe Smertith the fool / for lak of good a vis 650 But no wigt hath it smerted that is wys For wel is he ware / or he write or speke What is to do or leue / Who by prudence Rule him shal / no thing shal oute from him breke Hastily ne of rakel necligence 655 ffreend that is soth / o / nowe youre assistence And helpe / what I shal make I yow biseche In youre wys conceit / serche ye and seche He a long while in a studie stood And aftir warde thus he tolde his entente 660 Thomas saaf bettre avis I holde it good Sithin howe the hooly sesoun is of lente In wiche it sitt euery wigt him repente Of his offence / and of his wickidnesse / Be heuy of thi gilte / and thee confesse 72 THOMAS HOCCLEVE And satisfaccioun do thou for it Thou woost wel / on wymmen greet wite & lak Ofte hast thou putt / bi war / lest thou be quit Thy wordis fille wolde a quarter sak That thou in white / depeintid hast with blak 670 In her repreef mochel thing hast thou wrete Wiche thei not forgeue haue / ne forgete Sumwhat nowe write in honour & preis- ing Of hem / so maist thow do correccioun Somdel of thin offence and mys heering Thou art clene oute of hir affeccioun Nowe sithen it is in thin eleccioun Whether thee list / her loue a gein pur- chace Or stonde as thou dost / oute of loue and grace Be wys rede I / chese the bettir part 680 Triste wel this / wymen ben fel and wise Hem for to plese / lith greet craft and art Wher no fir made is / may no smoke arise But thou hast ofte / if thou the wel avise Made smoky brondis / and for al that gilt Yit maist thou stonde in grace / if thou wilt Bi buxum herte and bi submissiouz To her graces / yelding the coupable / Thou pardoun maist haue and remiscioum And do vn to hem plesaunce greable 690 To make partie / art thou no thing able Humble thi goost / be not sturdy of herte Bettir than thou art / han thei made to smerte The wyf of Bathe take I for auctrice That wymmen han no ioie ne deinte That men shulde vppon hem putte any vice I woot wel so / or like to that seith she By wordis writen / Thomas yelde the Euene as thou by scripture hast hem offendid Rigt so / lat it be by writyng amendid 700 Freend / thoug I do so / what lust or pleisir Shal my lorde therynne haue / noon / thinkith me Yis Thomas yis / his lust and his desir Is / as it wel sit / to his hie degre ffor his disporte / and mirthe in honeste With ladies / for to haue daliaunce And this booke / wole he hem shewen par chaunce And sithen he thi good lorde is / he be may ffor thee suche a meene / that the ligtlyere Shullen thei forgeue the / putte it in assay 710 My counseil / let see / not shal it thee dere So wolde I do / if in thi plite I were Leie hand on thi brest / if thou wilt so do Or leue / I can no more seie ther to But thoug to wymmen thou thin herte bowe Axinge her graces / with greet repen- tauce ffor thi giltees / thee wole I not alowe To take on thee suche rule and gouer- nauzce As thei thee reede wolde / for greuaunce So greet / ther folowe migt of it par cas 720 That thou repente it shuldist evcre Thomas Adam bigilid was thorug Eues reed And siker so was she by the Serpent To whom god seide / this womman thin heed Breke shal / for thorug thin enticement She hath y broke my comaundement O sithen womman had on the fende suche migt To breke a mannes heed / it semeth ligt For why let noon housbonde / thinke it shame Ne repreef vn to hym / ne vilenye 730 That his wijf dooth to him that selue same Hir resoun axith haue of men the mais- trie Thoug hooly writ witnesse it and testifie Man shulde of hem hane dominacioun It is the reuers in probacioun i aed DIALOGUE WITH A FRIEND 73 Hange vp his hachet / and sette him adoun ffor wonumen wole assente in no manere Vn to that pointe / ne that conclusioun Thomas / howe is it bitwixe the and thi fere Wel wel quod I / what list you ther of to here 740 My wyf mygt hoker haue and greet dis- dein If I shulde in suche caas / pleie a solein Nowe Thomas / if thou list to lyue in ese Prolle aftir wymmens beneuolence Thoug it be daungerous / good is hem plese ffor harde is / to renne in her offence What so thei seien / take al in pacience Bettir art thou not / than thi fadris bifore Han ben Thomas / be rigt wel ware therfore Freende harde it is / wymmen to greue I graunte 750 But what haue I a gilte / for him that dide Not haue I doon why / dar ye me auaunte Oute of wymmens gracis slippe or slide Yis Thomas yis / in the epistle of Cupide Thou hast of hem / so largely said That thei ben blak wrooth / and ful yuel apaid Freend / douteles sumwhat is ther in That sowneth but rigt smal to her honour But as to that / nowe for youre fadir kyn Considre / I was thereof noon auc- tour 760 I nas in that caas / but a reportour Of folkes tales / and that they seide / I wrote I not affermed it on hem / god it woote Who so that shal reherse a mannes sawe As that he seith / moot he seie & not varie ffor and he do / he dooth a gein the lawe Of trouthe / he may tho wordis not : contrarie ho so that seith I am her Aduersarie And dispreise her condiciouns and port ffor that I made of hem suche re- port / 770 He mis avisid is / and eke to blame Whanne I it spak / I spake conpleiningly I to hem thougte no repreef ne shame What worlde is this / howe vndirstande am I Loke in the same book / what stiketh by Who so loketh aright / therynne may thei see That they me ougte haue in greet chirtee And ellis / woot I not what is what The book concludith for hem / it is no nay Vertuously / my good frende / dooth it nat 780 Thomas I not / for yit I neuere it say No freend no Thomas / Wel trowe I in fay ffor had ye red it fully to the ende Ye wolde seie / it is not as ye wende Thomas / howe so it be / do as I seide Sithen it displesith hem / amendis make If that some of hem thee ther of vpbreide Thou shalt be besie y now I vndirtake Thi kut to kepe / and nowe | thee bitake To god / for I moot nedis fro the wende 790 The loue and thanke of wymmen / nowe god the sende Amonge I thenke thee for to visite Or that thi book fully finisshid be ffor looth me were / thou shuldist ougt write Wher thorug / thou migtest gete any mawgree And for that cause / I wole it ouer see And Thomas / nowe a dieu and fare weel Thou finde me shalt / steel al so trewe as Whane he was goon / I in myn herte dredde To stonde oute of wymmens beneuol- ence 800 And to fulfille that / that he me redde I shope me to do my peine and diligence To wynne hir loue by obedience Thoug I my wordis can not wel por- treie / 74 THOMAS HOCCLEVE Lo here the forme / howe I hem obeie My ladies alle / as wisly god me blesse Why that ye meued bene / can I not knowe My gilte cam neuere yit to his ripenesse Al thoug ye for youre foo / me deeme & trowe But I youre frende be / bite me the crowe 810 I am al othir to yow / than ye wene By my writing / hath it and shal be sene But netheles / I lowly me submitte To youre bountees / as fer as thei han place In yow / vn to me wrecche it may wel sitte To axe pardoun / thoug I not trespace Leuer is me / with pitous chere and face And meek spirit do so / than open werre Ye make me / and me putte at the werre A tale eke / wiche I in the Roman dedis 820 Nowe late sy / in honur & plesaunce Of yow my ladies / as I moot nedis Or take my way / for fere in to ffrance Thoug I not shapen be / to prike and praunce Wole I translate / and that my gilte I hope Shal pourge / as clene / as keuer- chiefs dooth sope [IN PRAISE OF CHAUCER] [Stanzas from the Regement of Princes, from the copy executed for Henry Prince of Wales, MS Arundel 38 of the British Museum. This volume has on fol. 37, at opening of the poem after the introduction, a miniature of the poet presenting his work to Henry. The leaf which probably carried the miniature of Chaucer, with lines 4990-5042, has been removed from the manuscript. | [MS Arundel 38, fol. 35b-36] Wyth hert as tremblyng as the leef of asp ffadir syn 3e me rede do so Of my simple conceyt wol I the clasp Vn do / And lat yt at his large go But welaway / so ys myn hert wo That the honour of englyssch tong is deed Of which / I wont was han consail & reed 1960 © mayster dere and fadir reuerent My mayster Chaucer flour of eloquence Mirrour of fructuous endendement © vniuersel fader in science Allas that thou thyn excellent prudence In thy bed mortel mightyst nort by quethe What eiled deth Allas why wolde he slethe Variants of Brit. Mus. Adds. 18632 (Ad) and Harley 4866 (H) are: 1954 herte tremblyng (Ad); 1955 rede to do so (HAd); 1957 and at his large lat hit goo (Ad); 1958 herte (HAd); 1959 tonge (HAd); 1963 entendement (HAd); 1964 of science (Ad); 1966 This MS errs: not (Ad), naght (H); 1967 sle the (HAd); 1971 His name . . . astertith (HAd); 1978 haast ment (H); 1980 no more seye (Ad). The MS formerly Phillipps 1099 reads in 1963 endytement, in 1980 no bettir seye. O deth thou dedyst nou3t harm synguleer In slaghtree of hym / but al ps land yt smertith But natheles 3yt hastow no power 1970 He name sle / hys hye vertu astertyth Vnslayn fro the / whych ay vs lyfly hertyth Wyth bokes of hys ornat endytyng That ys to al thys land enlumynyng. Hastow nou3t eeke my mayster Gower slayn Whos vertu I am in sufficient ffor to descryue. I woot wel in certayn ffor to sleen al thys world thou hast I ment But syn our lord cryst was obedient To the in feyth. I can no ferther seye 1980 Hys creatures mosten the obeye Symple as my goost and scars my let- terure 2073 Vn to 3our excellente for to write Myn inward loue / and 3it aventure Wil I me putte thogh I can but lyte My dere mayster god ys soul quyte And fadir Chaucer rayn wolde han me taght PRAISE OF CHAUCER 75 But I was dul . and lerned lyte or naght Alas my worthy mayster honorable 2080 Thys landes verray tresour and rychesse Deth by thy deth harme irriparable Vn to vs don. her vengeable duresse Despoyled hath this land of the swet- nesse Of rethorik / for vn to tullius Was neuer man so lyk a monges vs Also who was hier in philosophye To aristotle / in our tonge but bu The steppes of virgile in poesie Thow filwedist eek wot wel I now 2090 ‘That combre world pt pee my mayster slow Wolde I slayn were / deth was to hastyf To renne on the and reue the py (l)yf Deth hath but smal consideracion Vn to the vertuous I haue espyed / No more as schewyth the probacion Than to a vycyous mayster losel tried A mong an heep / every man ys mays- tried Wyth her as wel the poore as ys be ryche Leered and lewde eek standen al I leche 2100 Sche my3tte han taried hir vengeance a while Variants of Adds. 18632 and Harley 4866 are: 2073 Simple is (HAd); 2074 excellence (HAd); 2075 yit in auenture (HAd); 2077 soule (HAd); 2082 deth / hath harme (HAd); 2088 tonge ban thow (Ad)—note Ad’s understanding of hier, 2087, as “‘higher’’, not as “‘heir’’; 2090 men wite wel (Ad); 2093 first letter of Iwf is erased; 2104 MS reads brange; 2106 for the beste (Ad). The scribe has made several corrections during transcription. ‘The former Phillipps 1099 reads: 2073 scars is my; 2079 yong and lerne lyte; 2096 a scheweth probacton; 2099 as the riche; 2100 eek ben unto hyre lyche; 2104 lyke brynge forth to the; 2106 as for the beste. Til that sum man had egal to be be Nay lat be pat / she knewe wel pt bys Ile May neuere man forth bringe lyk to pe And hyre office nedes do moot sche God bad hire soo / I truste as for thi beste O maister maister / god py soule reste [MS Brit. Mus. Adds. 18632, fol. 93b] The firste foundere of oure faire lang- age 4978 hap seid in caas.semblable.and ober mo so hily wel. that hit is my dotage for to expresse . or touche ony of tho allas my fader. is fro be world go my worbi maister Chaucer. him I mene be pov aduoket for him . heuenes quene As bov wel knowest . o . blessed vir- gine 4985 wt louinge herte . and hie deuocioun in bin honour . he wrot ful many a lyne o . nov pin help . and thin promocioun to god pi sone . make a mocioun hov he pi seruaunt was. maiden marie and lat his loue . floure and fructifie Al bouh his lyf be quent. be resemblaunt of him hap in me .so fressh liflinesse that to putte other men. in remembraunce of his persone. I haue here his likinesse do make to this ende. in sothfastnesse that thei bt han of him lost bouht & mynde 4997 bi bis peinture may. agein him fynde Variant readings of Harley 4866 and of the remain- ing lines of Arundel 38 are: 4978 finder, fyndere (AdH); 4982 fro the world ys goo (AdH); 4991 queynt (H); 4992 resemblaunce (H); 4995 lyknesse (H); 4997 lest pought (H). The former MS Phillipps 1099 reads: 4978 of your faire; 4985 And thou; 4991 love; 4997 lost. 76 THOMAS HOCCLEVE [TO BEDFORD] [MS Huntington 111, fol. 37] CE FEUST MYS EN LE LIURE DE MONSR JOHAN LORS NOMEZ w ORE REGENT DE FRANCE & DUC DE BEDFORD Vn to the rial egles excellence I humble Clerc with al hertes hum- blesse This book presente / & of your reuerence Byseeche I pardon and foryeuenesse Pt of myn ignorance & lewdenesse 5 Nat haue I write it in so goodly wyse As pt me oght vn to your worthynesse Myn yen / hath custumed bysynesse So daswed / pt I may no bet souffyse 2 I dreede lest pt my maister Massy 10 Pt is of fructuous intelligence Whan he beholdith how vnconnyngly My book is metrid / how raw my sent- ence How feeble eek been my colours his prudence Shal sore encombrid been of my folie 75 But yit truste I / pt his beneuolence Compleyne wole myn insipience Secreetly / & what is mis rectifie 5 Thow book / by licence of my lordes grace To thee speke I / and this I to thee seye 20 I charge thee / to shewe thow thy face Beforn my seid Maister / & to him preye On my behalue / pt he peise and weye What myn entente is bt I speke in thee For rethorik hath hid fro me the keye 25 Of his tresor / nat deyneth hir nobleye Dele with noon so ignorant as me Cest tout JOHN LYDGATE John Lydgate, the “Monk of Bury,’ whose life was bounded by the years °1375 and 1448-9, is an apt example of that mutability of fortune which he and his contemporaries loved to dwell upon, of a reputation in his own day which has now faded as completely as has that of Cowley. He was born in the village of Lydgate, near the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk; he became as a lad a novice within its walls, and passed on through subdiaconate and diaconate to the priesthood in 1397. In 1421 he was made prior of Hatfield Broadoak, Essex, but after eleven years he relinquished that office and, so far as we know, returned to Bury. The last we hear of him through official docu- ments is a receipt on his behalf for his semi-annual pension from the Crown, dated Sept. 1449; and in the 27th year of Henry VI, 1448-9, he is spoken of as dead by the versifier John Metham. The tradition set on foot by Bale, that Lydgate studied at both Universities and traveled extensively abroad, has never received any corroborative proof. He seems to have been in France when the translation of the Dance Macabre was suggested to him; and headings by Shirley to some of the shorter poems state that they were composed in Oxford or in London; but there is no evidence that he did the bulk of his verse-production elsewhere than in his monastery. And if the most of his years were passed at Bury, it was in no secluded back- water of life that he dwelt. The seat of the Abbey was one of the larger towns of England. In Lydgate’s lifetime and in that of Chaucer, London had between forty and fifty thousand inhabitants, while very few other towns numbered more than ten thousand; most of the English people dwelt in hamlets of three hundred or less. Bury, with its four thousand population, was an important place; and the frequent disputes of Town and Gown in the period show that it was by no means dominated by its great Benedictine House. Life there was not perhaps at the tension of life in London, but the town was no sleepy nook of silence ; and literature also had its vicarious experience to offer to a monk of Bury. The Abbey Library was one of England’s largest book-collections. John Boston of Bury, Lydgate’s contemporary and fellow-monk, travelled all over England in- vestigating and cataloguing monastic libraries; and none in his list was better stocked than that of Bury itself, with its two thousand or more volumes of both sacred and profane literature. Had Lydgate chosen, he could have studied there not only Cicero and Seneca, but Horace and Juvenal, Virgil, Statius, Plautus, and Terence. . Neither life nor letters, however, could yield to Lydgate quite the same opportunity as to Chaucer. The pressure of the monastic habit of thought, the monastic routine, lay heavy on a cloistered monk; and had Lydgate ever possessed the keen sensibilities with which Chaucer came to books, they must have been deadened by the amount of work which he did to order. He probably showed, in early manhood, a glibness with words and with rime which made him conspicu- ous in his monastery; one commission followed another, and his facile “eloquence” was soon in steady demand for any occasion requiring verses. A mumming by London merchants before the Lord Mayor, a “letter” to accompany Christmas gifts to the king, an explanation of the Mass for a pious Countess to keep in her chamber, a set of stanzas to serve up with the “subtlety” at a banquet, a com- [77 } 78 JOHN LYDGATE plaint for a lovesick squire to offer his lady, the “histories” to accompany figures in a fresco or in tapestry, either for a graveyard or for a wealthy mercer’s parlor, a colossal translation of Boccaccio’s “tragedies” for the Duke of Gloucester,— are examples of the monk’s varied commissions. He has left a good many thousand lines of brief poems, religious and secular ; but his larger pieces of work were the mainstay of his reputation for genera- tions; and most of these were translations done to order. For Henry V, while still Prince of Wales, Lydgate translated the Troy Book, a rewriting, in 30,000 pentameter couplet lines, of the Trojan story, drawn apparently from Guido delle Colonne. This was begun in 1412 and finished in 1420, according to its own statements; and it was probably preceded by another work for the same prince, the Life of Our Lady, 6,000 lines long, in sevens. The Earl of Salisbury com- missioned from Lydgate a translation of Deguilleville’s Pélerinage de la Vie Humaine, which Lydgate tells us was begun in 1426, and which runs to 25,000 lines, mainly short couplets. The poet’s Guy of Warwick was done at the request of Margaret Lady Talbot, daughter of thel Earl of Warwick; it is less ponder- ous,—of 592 lines only. Lady Talbot’s father, Richard de Beauchamp Earl of Warwick, while Lieutenant-General of France after the death of Henry V, or- dered of Lydgate, in 1426, a translation setting forth the hereditary right of Henry VI to the French crown,—329 lines in pentameter couplets. For presenta- tion to the youthful king, and at the command of Curteys, abbot of Bury, Lydgate wrote, in 1433, the Lives of SS. Edmund and Fremund, 3,700 lines rime royal. Later, in 1439, the abbot of St. Albans requested of Lydgate a life of SS. Albon and Amphabell, which runs to 4,700 lines, in sevens. And the heaviest of Lyd- gate’s undertakings, the 36,000 lines of the Fall of Princes, translated from Laurent de Premierfait’s second prose version of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, was executed between 1431 and 1438 for Humphrey duke of Glou- cester, brother of Henry V, first founder of the library of the University of Ox- ford, and Maecenas of his time. Nor do these commissioned and datable poems exhaust the list of Lyd- gate’s longer works. A translation from the French, entitled Reason and Sen- suality, is dated conjecturally about 1408; it is of 7,000 lines in short couplets, unfinished. The Churl and the Bird, also from the French, may date even -earlier. The Dance Macabre, another translation from the French, must postdate the exe- cution of the wall-painting (1424) in Paris whence Lydgate says he took it; it is of almost 700 lines, in stanza. A tale supplementary to the Canterbury Tales, the Siege of Thebes, 4,700 lines in pentameter couplets, was perhaps written between 1420 and 1422. The poet’s Testament, written presumably late in life, is of 900 lines in stanza; and according to a note in the manuscripts, his death occurred while he was engaged upon a version of the so-called advice of Aristotle, to Alexander, the Secreta Secretorum, of which Lydgate did about 1,500 lines in sevens, his follower Burgh(?) continuing the work. To these ca.120,000 lines of well-authenticated verse we must add the mass of the shorter poems; and here we are on less certain ground. The list of Lydgate’s works drawn up by Ritson (see below p. 99) has been denounced by Schick and dissected by MacCracken; but from its fault of method, its tendency to add to the Lydgatian canon any piece of fifteenth-century verse didactic in content, accurate in rime, and jerkily ambling in rhythm, we are not yet free. The collection of the monk’s minor poems made by J. O. Halliwell in 1840 assigned to Lydgate work marked as his by any manuscript, or even appearing without JOHN LYDGATE 79 author’s name in a volume including some Lydgatian poems. No classification of MS-authorities according to their probable trustworthiness has yet been made, and no canon of Lydgate has been drawn up in which there is separation be- tween the poems claimed by Lydgate in his text, the poems mentioned as his by contemporaries, the poems assigned to him by trustworthy scribes, and the poems without any external evidence as to authorship. The list of his writings in the Dictionary of National Biography is entirely uncritical, and the canon as endorsed by MacCracken, in: his EETS edition of the Minor Poems, vol. i, is marred by the addition of a number of poems unmarked in any MS and accepted solely by Dr. MacCracken’s personal judgment. Relying first upon the few manuscripts written by Lydgate’s contempor- ary, John Shirley, manuscripts very fully marked with authors’ names—and upon one codex, Harley 2255 of the British Museum, which may have been com- piled for Lydgate’s own abbot, we can add to the canon of the monk’s works some 15,000 lines of minor poems.!_ In few cases is it possible to date them. The Departing of Chaucer is probably of 1417; the epithalamium to the Duke of Gloucester is of 1422; the Coronation address to Henry VI must be of 1429; and the two mummings in honor of Estfeld’s London mayoralty are of 1429 or 1437. But we can only conjecture as to the dates of the remaining mum- mings or of the tapestry poems, while for the prayers, the hymns, and the didac- tic verse we have no criterion other than internal, than the better or worse handling of rhythm and subject. : This standard is difficult of application to Lydgate. The student who had never read a line of his work might suspect, upon hearing of its enormous amount, that its quality was strained. It is indeed. And with Lydgate the period of life at which he writes has less to do with his power of expression than has his subject. The Testament may have been of his later years, but it contains fine stanzas of deep religious feeling, notably that praised by Churton Collins, in which Christ addresses the sinner thus: * John Shirley, several of whose commonplace-books remain to us (see p. 192 here), not only transcribed a mass of poems by Chaucer and by Lydgate, but wrote for many of his copies full “gossippy” headings, from which we draw some curious particulars. A Shirley volume in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge (R, 3, 20), has 60 entries; nine of these are by Chaucer and one by Hoccleve, five mention no author (although another Shirley MS ascribes two of them to Lydgate), nine are in Latin or French, eight are mere bits, such as proverbs or recipes, and 28 are marked as by Lydgate. This collection includes his six mummings, which are preserved nowhere else, two tapestry poems, two personal poems addressed to Gloucester, and the Coronation Address to Henry VI; the rest are religious and didactic,— 4500 lines in all. A Shirley codex in the British Museum, Adds. 16165, has 23 entries, of which eight are there assigned to Lydgate, including the Temple of Glass, the Black Knight, the Departing of Chaucer, and a New Year’s poem; the total is 2600 lines, or 3200 if we accept the complaint appended to the Temple of Glass, the genuineness of which is doubted by Prof. Schick, the EETS editor of the poem. Another Shirley volume, Bodl. Ashmole 59, besides reproducing ten of the entries made in the Cambridge and in the London codices, and copying as separate poems four extracts from longer works, adds to the above list 14 poems,— 1480 lines. Four of these latter are also contained in MS Harley 2255 of the British Museum. If the tiny coat of arms in its initial means that this codex was written for William Curteys, abbot of Bury during the last twenty years of Lydgate’s life (on which point see Anglia 28:24), then the authority of its ascriptions is high. The number of its entries marked as by Lydgate is 24, four of which are already in our list; among the others are the Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, the Letter to Gloucester, the legend of St. Austin at Compton, and the Testament. Most of its contents are religious, and the number of lines assigned to Lydgate is 5800. 80 JOHN LYDGATE Tarye no longer toward thyn herytage Hast on thy weye and be of ryght good chere Go eche day onward on thy pylgrymage Thynke howe short tyme thou shalt abyden here Thy place is byggyd aboue the sterres clere Noon erthly palys wrought in so statly wyse Kome on my frend my brother most entere For the I offred my blood in sacryfyce Yet other late verse by Lydgate, such as the Secrees, has no value; and other religious verse by him, when done to order, as St. Albon was done to order, can drop to a very low level, not so low as Guy of Warwick, but weakly mo- notonous. In Lydgate’s many and respectful allusions to Chaucer he pleases us; but when he attempts to imitate the Prologue he makes a lamentable failure. If the Flower of Courtesy be his (for which we have only the word of the editor of the 1561 Chaucer) he was capable of grace and sweetness of expression on a hackneyed subject; but his epithalamium to Gloucester is a wooden piece of work. His sunrises and spring settings were not unjustly praised by Warton: compare the picture of Spring in Reson and Sensuality 101 ff., and many pas- sages in the Troy Book (e. g. i: 1197 ff., 1271 ff., 3094 ff., 3907 ff. etc.), pic- tures much better and more detailed than the monk permits himself in the Fall of Princes (cf. v: 1506-11 there). In this respect, as in others, the Troy Book is the most successful of Lydgate’s longer works; in vivacity, in self-expression, in knowledge of life, it is much superior to the Siege of Thebes, although it be a commissioned task and a translation. If a religious emotion be absent, and if Lydgate lacks the restraint of a compact stanzaic original, such as he had for the Dance Macabre, he easily wanders; the slender substance of his meaning dries into the sands of his fluency, and he blunders among words, unable to advance to a goal which he does not clearly see. He spoils Canace’s lament by a tasteless allusion to Cupid as causer of the tragedy; he cannot let Paris relate his dream, in Priam’s family council, without a pedantic explanation of the attributes of Mercury. He can no more deny himself a digression, espe- cially a didactic one, than could Browning; but it is not Browning’s pressure of bounding vitality, like that of a dog quartering a new countryside, which drives Lydgate to utterance; it is a sort of “total recall,” the inability to stop until a whole series of familiar and related phrases have been not only reeled off, but ‘repeated. This verbosity, when joined to a lack of structural sense, is disas- trous; and Lydgate had little or no structural sense. He had no notion of the -value of brevity, of selection among details. Indeed, his proclaimed theory is to the contrary. He says, in the prologue to the Fall of Princes, lines 92, 93, that a story “constrained under wordes fewe’’ is no story; see page 158 here. But Chaucer’s view is the more truly psychological; cf. the Squire’s Tale lines 393 ff. :— The knotte, why that every tale is told, If it be taried til that lust be cold Of hem that han it after herkned yore, The savour passeth ever lenger the more, For fulsomenesse of his prolixitee. The remark of Gosse, that Lydgate appears better in selections than in wholes, means of course that the monk’s inability to conceive of structure, to treat any JOHN LYDGATE 81 part of his work with reference to any other part, or to get from one episode or mood to another, is disguised by the process of selection. No writer is at once ‘so slow and so breathless as Lydgate; his discourse advances at a crawl, with constant returns upon itself, but marks time with such volubility that the reader is bewildered. It is indeed possible to collect some handfuls of good verses from the many thousand lines which Lydgate has left, mainly from the Troy Book and the Fall of Princes. For instance :-— And saue be eye atwen was no message DuorMerc 54 is less striking. Solitarie in captiuite For many fader schal his sone se Hol in be morwe pat schal be slawe or eve Lat vs with swerde & nat with wordis fight Pe swerde of rancour may nat alwey bite —pbe fomy wawes wyde Pat to sight whelmen vp so grene And al be eyr with schot of arowis kene Ischadwed was pat Phebus bemys bright Vp on pe soille was dirked of his light Aforn his swerd Grekis go to wrak Cf. 11:7272, iii:1470-71 Of noyse of hors be erpe gan to tremble Or be heuene be clustred and depeynt With brighte sterris in be Euenynge See Chaucer’s Boece iv, metr. 1, 23-4. Liche as be goddis wolde haue take wrak And had of newe assentid ben in oon Pe londe to drenche of Deucalyon From the Latin of Guido. With swiche colour as men go to her graue See Troilus iv :862-3. Furiously walkynge vp and doun And alweye fix on hir he hadde his loke See Knight’s Tale 1949. And verray wery of his owne lyf See FaPrinces i:3774, iii:2825, Thebes 2518. When be hote mery somers day No dwery is but like a geant longe Nat Cleopatra goyng to her graue For euery wo by processe muste aswage See ii1:458, 4086, etc. Liche be sonne bat shynep in be reyn Pes in be face but in be herte werre Ther was al merthe ther was al melodie Al worldli welthe shal fadyn as a rose God hath a thousand handes to chastise (etc. ) From Laurent’s French. Troy Book ii :3718 Troy Book ii :3906 Troy Book ii :4204-5 Troy Book ii :4381 Troy Book ii :7028 Troy Book 11 :8036-7 Troy Book ii :8106-8 Troy Book i1 :8493 Troy Book iii :1562 Troy Book iii :2680-1 Troy Book iii :3294-6 Troy Book iii :4185 Troy Book iii :5143 Troy Book iv :608 Troy Book iv :2386 Troy Book iv :3390-1 Troy Book iv :3658 Troy Book iv :3702 Troy Book iv :5224 Troy Book iv :6132 FaPrinces i: :593 FaPrinces i :942 FaPrinces i :1331 ff 82 JOHN LYDGATE She may be troublid but ouercome neuere FaPrinces i:1366 On to the deth he felte his herte colde FaPrinces i :4480 Cf. Chaucer, MLTale 781, etc., Troy Book i:2050, iii :4546, v:3123, etc. Fame in her paleis hath trumpes mo than oon FaPrinces i:5111 Oon bet the bussh another hath the sparwe FaPrinces i:5127 The sterrid heuene is thi couerture FaPrinces i:6161 Go foorth my soule peur & inmortal FaPrinces ii :1310 From Coluccio’s Latin, see ModPhil 25:56. Now heer now ther as botis hom to londe FaPrinces iii :1321 Sum drope of pite lat in thyn herte fleete FaPrinces iii :2040 For comparisouns doon ofte gret greuaunce FaPrinces iii :2188 See HorseGooseSheep 526. The wise war the circumspect goddesse FaPrinces iii :4237 Vnder that dirked and cloudi orizonte FaPrinces iii :4345 Al for the werre & nothyng for the pees FaPrinces iv :1817 See Troy Book ii:3319. Than gaff he sentence & theron he abood FaPrinces v :455 Thi secre bosum is ful of stories FaPrinces vi :309 In Laurent, “ton giron qui est tresgarny des hystoires.” In Phebus presence sterris lese her liht FaPrinces vi :2983 See note on FaPrinces G 36 here. The faire day men do praise at eue FaPrinces ix :2024 See ModLangNotes 36:115-18. These are sufficiently striking. But it is to be remembered, first, that most rimesters can show a good line or two; John Hamilton Reynolds or Leigh Hunt has occasionally a verse or a bit of observation which reminds us that they were indeed contemporaries and friends of Keats. And secondly, these ex- tracts or twice their number make hardly a ripple in the ocean of Lydgate’s - 140,000 and more lines, lines not only thin in substance but clogged with formulae. We dredge up such a bit as Achilles’ plaint of his love for Polyxena, Troy Book iv: 707-8,— Or how shal I ben hardy to apere In the presence of hir eyen clere,— and it is an excellence. In the text, however, it immediately follows, For how shuld I be bold to haue repaire Or dorn, allas, comen in hir sight. That is, Lydgate’s habit of repetition is constant, his power of expression easily overborne; and the linking of the happier couplet to the weaker injures the effect of the whole. The monk’s habit of padding, too, is injurious. He has memory and appreciation enough to quote his great master; but when we find “For pitee renneth sone in gentil herte” appearing in the form For pite, who that kan aduerte, Renneth sone in gentyl herte,— ResonandSens 6915-6 JOHN LYDGATE 83 we recognize not only the merit of the attempt at citation, but the clumsiness of the formula which splits it.1 And similarly with the monk’s allusions to nature. They are often apparently fortunate; but we cannot with certainty praise, e.g., his feeling for the lark, and add to our list such a bit as —til the larke song With notes newe hegh vp in pe ayr, Thebes 2296-7 because in the Troy Book Lydgate so frequently uses the lark’s song mechanically, to date the beginning of a battle. We cannot tell, in his work, when his imagi- nation is perhaps, for a moment free and when he is using a formula which by accident shapes into a “sport.” And however interesting this list of detached lines, the sunrise and spring-descriptions of the Troy Book, the allusions to Chaucer, the feeling for little children, the monk’s real lyrical adoration of his crucified Master, these passages are constantly damaged by his bad stylistic habits, and lost in the flood of his uncontrollable verbiage. Neither in structural power, descriptive power, emotional power, nor metrical power, is there any real parallel between Lydgate and his great exemplar Chaucer. His verbosity and his habit of repetition are superficial faults, but none the less displeasing ; and deeper-seated than they are the monk’s lack of feeling for structure and proportion, his dulness of perception. Lydgate’s material overpowers him; he is the creature of routine phrase; and his deficiencies in sensitiveness, in control, in balance, are as evident in his versification as in his guidance of narrative. There also are the automatic repetition, the jerky hesitation, the failure to see the part in relation to the whole, which are stamped on his story-method. But Lydgate’s versification has been seriously and carefully discussed. Professor Schick, the first critical editor of a Lydgate-text, adopted for the pentameter line of the Temple of Glass (EETS 1891) five principal forms or types, which he differentiated according to the number of their syllables. His type 1 is regular, of five iambs; type 2 is like the preceding, but with an extra syllable at the verse-pause; type 3, the “Lydgate line,’ or brokenbacked line, lacks an unaccented syllable at the pause; type 4, the headless line, lacks the opening unaccented syllable; and type 5 has a trisyllabic first foot. This classification takes account only of the syllabic compass of the single verse; it makes no mention of variety in rhythmic flow within the line, of the lengthening or shortening of the poetic phrase around the line-unit, of the line as part of the poetic paragraph, or of the relation between line-and-paragraph rhythm and poetic content. By discussing minutely the number of syllables, it creates the impression that Lydgate’s versification has been analyzed; whereas every- thing important to rhythm has been passed over unnoticed. Professor Schick has no thought of rescuing Lydgate from censure by thus narrowing the scope of analysis; he speaks with emphasis of Lydgate’s metrical shortcomings. But later students, still limiting themselves to the single line, have attempted to con- done those shortcomings. In a monograph on the metric of the Chaucerian Tra- dition, published in 1910, Dr. Licklider treated the question more historically Chaucer often enough inserts a formula, for rime’s sake, into a couplet; cf. for example BoDuchess 1065, 1119, the prol. LGW 454, and especially Troilus v: 1040-41. But nearly always in Chaucer the vigor, the moving force of his matter, carries us over such bare patches; while in Lydgate there is not sufficient impetus in the context to prevent the dead halt. 84 JOHN LYDGATE than did Professor Schick, with the aim of justifying, e.g., Lydgate’s line-struc- ture by that of modern poets. Dr. Licklider assumes, to begin with, that the stresses of verse are fixed, that they invariably fall upon the syllables which schematically come under them, whether such syllables be verbs or indefinite ar- ticles. Should a preposition thus appear under ictus, it is raised in value by “pitch-accent,” and the effect of the line is heightened by this ennobling of its grammatically less dignified elements. In such a verse, for example, as Milton’s Deep malice to conceal, coucht with revenge, the italicized words are raised to higher power by their position under stress ; and any line in Lydgate, in the Transition, in later English poetry, which shows this “pitch accent on relational words” acquires value thereby. This view of English pentameter line-structure is not here accepted. It is obvious that the single line shows, in both modern and medieval English verse, a frequent coincidence of theoretic stress with unimportant syllable; but instead of explaining this coincidence, in any poet, as a heightening of word-value by the impact of immutable stress, I shall treat the line and the paragraph as plastic, subject at every moment to the shaping hand of the poet; I shall recognize, as already stated (p. 19), the “perpetual conflict” of the verse-norm and of language- freedom as the living foundation of English verse. The line from Milton, above cited, I explain by the poet’s shift of word-weight within the verse; a heavy first foot, a light second, a reversed fourth, challenge the reader’s ear by their di- vergence from standard as regards the massing of stress, while the total weight of the line remains standard. Chaucer, in his handling of rhythm, shows the same desire to vary it, now to reduce and now to increase line-weight, now to reduce and now to increase breath-length, to make up a paragraph out of slightly differing lines, that the greatest modern poets have shown. He has not their sub- tleties of ear, their developed sense of balance within the single verse; such com- pensation, or poise of the heavy against the light foot, as that of Milton just noted, is not Chaucerian. But the simpler variants of tetrameter and pentameter flow, underweighting and reversal, are very freely used by Chaucer, and with in- creasing skill as he grows older. He also made, at first, extensive use of the line short a syllable at opening, a variant frequent in his Hous of Fame. In that poem (using Skeat’s text) we find not only very many single headless lines, but such lines grouped in pairs, occasionally in threes, and once in a sequence of four. But in Chaucer’s pentameter, so far as we can now judge, this lavishly- employed license of the short couplet becomes a minor variant; Skeat’s text of the General Prologue has but nine acephalous lines, and the two pairs of such verses in the D-fragment, the two in the Knight’s Tale, serve for especial em- phasis or for enumeration. Chaucer’s treatment of the line in this respect was not understood by Lyd- gate, who not only wrote the acephalous verse very freely in pentameter, but made as much or more use of another truncated line-form, that lacking an unac- cented syllable just after the verse-pause.1 It looks as if the monk thought in half-lines, and, having accepted a line-form headless in the first half, saw no reason why the second half also should not be headless. The existence of this * How in manhod he was peréles FaPrinces iii :3617 (headless) Nor allé men may nat been iliche FaPrinces i:5120 (brokenbacked) JOHN LYDGATE 85 brokenbacked line in Chaucer is still questionable ; even the poorest Chaucer MSS show no drift to the type, and no evidence has yet been presented to prove that the dropping of inflexional -e would bring such a line into being oftener, e.g., than lines short in the fourth foot. Moreover, the mind which would lay hold of lines accidentally shortened at the cesura by the scribe and erect them into a type is a mind already thinking, as I have said, in half-lines. Lydgate’s dif- ference from other Transition versifiers in his use of these two truncated pen- tameter-forms is another reason for seeking their explanation in his individuality. The headless line was not written by Gower; it was not used by Hoccleve to any extent; it was not written by the scrupulous scribe of the Palladius; it is not common in later Transition verse. We can find it in late sixteenth-century prints, for instance in The Flower and the Leaf; but there the textual conditions have become too complicated to serve as evidence. So far as we yet see, the use of these two truncated line-forms centralizes in Lydgate, and in Chaucer there seems clear sanction for but one of them, the headless line. An explanation of Lydgate’s procedure has been variously but unsatisfac- torily sought. The fall of inflexional -e, as I have studied it in a small number of texts, produces lines clumsy in many ways, but not predominantly headless or brokenbacked; and there remain outside its influence a large number of truncated lines in Lydgate, and in Lydgate alone. If the influence of the Old English alliterative verse, with its sharp medial break, was strong enough to develop the brokenbacked line in Lydgate, why not in other poets? That Chau- cer’s truncated line-form should be taken up, and extended, by Lydgate and by Lydgate alone, of a group of versifiers using a common language and sharing a common history, argues some quality of difference in Lydgate himself. That quality I see most clearly not in his adoption of the truncated line but in his excessive use of it and in his extension of truncation to the second half-line. As regards the headless line which he could find in Chaucer, a man so prone to repetition as was Lydgate, so devoid of sensitiveness, of balance, and of feeling for variety as his narrative-wanderings and his continual formulae show him to have been, would not discriminate between Chaucer’s use of a variant and his own mass-manufacture of a staple. As regards the brokenbacked line, which is not Chaucer’s, the student who works through a quantity of Lydgate’s verse with an ear alert to its phrasing will recognize that the half-line is the fa- vored breath-length, and that the great number of padding phrases filling just half a line either supports or helps cause this tendency. If the monk felt his verse more in half-lines than in lines, the extent to which he uses the broken- backed line may be due to that limitation in him rather than to his transference of it as a whole line from any source, Latin or English. His excess of these truncated lines, his excess of padding phrases, find their explanation together in his lack of structural and aesthetic feeling. Some part of them may be due to the rate at which he was compelled to produce; but that it was natural to him to repeat himself is as obvious as that he thereby gave no offence to the taste of his contemporaries. Any man who carries repetition to the extent to which Lydgate carried it is a man in all respects insensitive, a man not quick nor clear of sight, not alive to the way character reveals itself in trivial action, dull of ear, deficient in taste, unaware of that “perpetual con- flict” between language and rhythm which, though not formulated by Chaucer in theory, is revealed in his practice. Such a man, because he lacks perceptual power, lacks therefore a plan; he repeats or dilutes himself because he is unclear 86 JOHN LYDGATE about his next step; he knows that his story has an ending and has certain high points, but how to get from one to another, or how to make those points stand out, he knows not; yet he keeps talking. Lydgate’s incompetences in rhythm, in style, in narrative-management, cannot be exemplified in a brief essay. The an- alysis of many passages parallel to Chaucer, will show us, so far as rhythm is concerned, that Lydgate habitually writes less than half his lines iambic-normal, Chaucer a full half or more; it will show Lydgate’s constant use of the truncated line and Chaucer’s decreasing use of it as time goes on; it will show that Lyd- gate treats Chaucer’s rhythmic “easements” as if they were “staples,” to borrow terms from Professor Saintsbury. The student of narrative can take the opening paragraph of the Siege of Thebes and compare it with Chaucer’s mode of starting the Canterbury Tales; he can parallelize Chaucer’s clear completion of his twice- repeated Whan by Than, his gradual narrowing of the reader’s interest to focus on Canterbury, with Lydgate’s helpless and verbless wanderings ; he can examine the same Chaucerian passage beside Troy Book i:1197-1221 as regards the ar- rangement of line-types in a paragraph. And he will find the same man, whether rhythm, style, or narrative management be the angle of observation; a man floating in a tide of material which he cannot guide, check, or see. Lists of parallel passages, lists of line-types, do not show the differences between Lydgate and his master; they cannot make clear, for example, that a variant line may be pleasing or unpleasing according to its context and content; that the final thing in judging rhythm is not the rhythm itself but the union of rhythm and contained meaning. Thus, in Chaucer’s description of his Knight there occurs, lines 75-6, the following: Of fustian he wered a gipoun Al bismotered with his habergeoun. Were this couplet analyzed rhythmically, the stressed a of the one line, the lack of upbeat to the other, would be rated as harsh, and the lines placed among aber- rant types. But in the masterful flow of the Prologue they are carried with no sense of the disagreeable. For there we come upon them after the narrator has proved his power. We may have been but partially conscious of the strong sweep of the opening paragraph; we may not have noticed the effect of lengthened breath and of reversal in That fro the tyme that he first began To ryden out, he loved chyvalrye, Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye; but we have been influenced by them, and by the roll of sounding place-names, names as proudly and deliberately trumpeted as Milton’s or Moody’s similar sum- mons to the imagination. In such context, after such prelude, the single line of less rhythmical quality passes current. And_,as the context carries these, so does the content carry the third of the lines just quoted. There is an almost identical structure present in either of these verses :— ffourme and colour merite and beaute Palladius iv :808 Pees and quyete / concord and vnyte Thebes 4703 But Palladius’ enumeration of the points of a horse, Lydgate’s generalized and overlapping terms, have none of Chaucer’s stirring emphasis on the essential qualities of knighthood, an emphasis which for the moment raises the pitch of life. JOHN LYDGATE 87 Yet Lydgate has interest and value for the student. Historically, he sums up his age as definitely as did Pope or Dr. Johnson; technically his importance may be a negative one, but in his choice of verse-forms and subjects he is note- worthy ; and his vocabulary is his most permanent and positive contribution to Eng- lish. Among his verse-forms the pentameter seven-line stanza bulks largest, be- cause of the Fall of Princes, the Life of Our Lady, and St. Edmund, which to- gether run to over 45,000 of his ca.55,000 such lines. But the pentameter couplet. as in the Troy Book, Thebes, and three shorter poems, amounts te over 35,000 lines, the four-beat couplet to 32,000, for almost 25,000 of which the Pilgrimage accounts. The eight-line pentameter stanza is used for many of Lydgate’s short religious poems; and as he may have had a freer hand there than in his long commissioned works, the stanza) was perhaps more to his taste than it was to Chaucer’s. Other verse-forms are few in the monk’s work. One or two attempts at a roundel, a New Year’s poem in threes, and an occasional shift of form within a poem, represent Lydgate’s range. The Testament is in sevens and eights, the Temple of Glass in rime royal and couplet; the prologues to poems, as in St. Edmund, St. Albon, and the Pilgrimage, are sometimes in a form other than that of the poem itself. In all this we cannot trace any conscious adaptation of form to subject; the pentameter couplet is used for the Troy Book and also for the Mumming at Hertford, the seven-line stanza for both comedy and trag- edy ; the eight-line stanza, although apparently preferred for the shorter religious poems, is also used for the Letter to Gloucester and for Horns Away. In choice of theme Lydgate has done some service to English. He intro- duced, it seems, the first bit of that Fool-literature which was carried so much further by Barclay under Brant’s—or rather Locher’s—influence; he brought in the Dance of Death motive; he wrote a few clumsy mummings which are appar- ently the first of their type in our literature; he set moving in English a pageant of “tragedies” which endured until the time of Shakespeare. None of his inno- vations had in it the germ of long life, but they count for something in our literary history. It is Lydgate’s services to the language which are both noteworthy and per- manent. His is not the use of words at their full metaphorical power, which is one of the dangerous joys of the Romantic poet. No closepacked phrases, no epithets rich in imaginative thrill, have to be unfolded and tasted by the mind as we read him. His value is for the lexicographer. Although archaic and re- condite terms do appear in his pages,—amate, avale, blive, enose, fage, queme, suppowaile, ure-—and although he unsuccessfully endeavors to obtain currency for flaskisable and tarage, a very large number of useful words make their first appearance in English under his auspices. For example :'—abuse, adjacent, adol- escence, aggregate*, arable*, attempt*, auburn, avaricious*, capacity*, circum- spect, colic*, combine*, commodious, condign, confidence, conspirator, counter- mand, credulity*, criminal, debar, deception, delude*, depend*, detestable*, dial, disappear*, dislodge*, dismay*, duplicity, entitle*, equivalent*, excel, fallible, fraternal*, fraudulent, gallery*, gentlemanly, grandmother, humidity*, immutable, impregnable, incident, incredible, inexcusable*, infallible*, intermission*, inter- rupt, invincible, irrigate*, magnate, massive, musical, passionate*, paternal*, per- suade*, pirate, powerless*, pretence*, provoke, rural, solicitude*, tedious*, ter- * Words marked with an asterisk are used by Lydgate earlier than the first case recorded in the New English Dictionary; and the list could be much extended. 88 JOHN LYDGATE rible*, timorous*, tolerance, transcend*, unoccupied*. Many of these are used repeatedly in the Troy Book and in the Fall of Princes, the -ble and -ent words often in rime. In a few cases we can see the word making the crossing from Laurent’s French, e.g., adolescence, magnate; and the word inexcusable, stand- ing at the head of the second chapter of Romans, may have caught Lydgate’s eye there; for he, like Isidore and many another medieval rhetorician, was very much aware of language in the dictionary-sense. As one works with the New English Dictionary, it is noticeable how often the three principal fifteenth-century trans- lators, Trevisa, Lydgate, and Caxton, are responsible for the introduction of abstract but useful terms, for the development of the power to express shades of thought. Lydgate not only brings into English these convenient polysyllables, he makes a word familiar by repetition, often by repetition in rime or in formula. His padding-formulae are one of the most characteristic features of his style, and therefore especially revelatory of the man. Their abuse by him is precisely parallel to his abuse of the headless line; he found both in Chaucer, and em- ployed neither in Chaucer’s manner. Chaucer used formulae all through his work, for the sake of rime; within about 400 lines of the Knight’s Tale (264-676) we find out of doute 283, I dar wel seyn 293, as olde bokes seyn 340, 605, sothly to telle 341, 676, pleynly for tendyte 351; these are all handy tools for Lydgate. We find also the halfline ther nis namor to seye (264) a filler used by Lydgate a score of times in the Troy Book ; we find in line 617 as faste as euere he may, which is worked by Lydgate, in the form in al the haste he may, another score of times in the same poem. All the lines and phrases of expedited narrative, so abundant in Lydgate, he could find in Chaucer; see this same KnTale passage, lines 330, 332, 343, 500, 522, 559. Chaucer uses as first half-line the phrase This al and som, cf. PoFoules 650, WBprol 91; Lydgate does the same thing ten or twelve times in the Troy Book. But the medium in which Chaucer’s padding formulae and expletives are carried is of so firm and flavored a quality that our attention is not diverted by them. They are not only less frequent than in Lydgate, but often seem formulae only when we have disengaged them from their context. Lydgate, however, does with these rime-tags as with his headless and brokenbacked lines; they are ag- gressive in number, aggressively defined against a slack and ineffective back- ground, and emphatic of a half-line movement of thought. That the monk turned consciously and continually to line-tags is shown by his use of padding in the first half-line as well as in the second; e.g., Withoute mor, Withoute abood,— which occur some fifty times in the Troy Book. The pages of that poem are also sprinkled with colorless expletives such at platly, pleynly, in soth, sothly, used in mid-line; and the emptiness of these words and phrases to Lydgate’s mind is shown by the way he redoubles them. He writes in al the haste he may:—with- oute mor delay, as consecutive riming half-lines, Troy Book i:3993-4, ii:7917-18, 8329-30; he repeats his meaning as shortly and make no delay ii:1918-19 (see iv:1888) ; he more than doubles on himself in ii:8556, Anon forthwith and make no delay. With this last we may compare his frequent repetitions such as :— That he constreyned right of verray nede Compelled was iustly to procede To han redres only by rigour. Troy Book ii:1773-5 JOHN LYDGATE 89 See also the same poem 1:3489-93, ii:2098-2100, 3761-3, iii:1231-36, 1541-3, 1677-78, 3538, iv:153-56, 258-59, 5051-55. Of the same character are his lengthened repetitions in the Fall of Princes, e.g., i:1898 ff. and 1905 ff., where Cadmus’ prayer to Apollo is twice given in two consecutive stanzas. Perhaps for this last Lydgate might see a precedent in passages like Chau- cer’s Clerk’s Tale 410 ff. or Franklin’s Tale 337-40. He might consider that his use of pleynly eke withal, Troy Book ii:949, or of ouermore platly eke (ibid. v :2475), was justified by Chaucer’s And eke also, e.g., HoFame 178;! certainly the pupil uses the last-named reduplication often enough,—ten or fifteen times in the Troy Book alone. But whether he was following Chaucer or following a general rhetorical license, Lydgate was by nature prone to repetition and insensi- tive to its effect. No man with a feeling for style would have written the number of ill-fitting rime-tags which we find in the Troy Book; cf. prol. 101-2, i :95-6, 669- 70, 3081-82 and iii:2757, ii:2155-56, 2785-86, 2789-90, 5179-80, 7809-10 and v:2101-2, etc. Probably neither Lydgate nor his readers saw any more incon- gruity in his Trojan heroes’ bidding each other farewell “with St. John to borrow,” Troy Book i:3082, iii:2757, than Lydgate saw in Chaucer’s use of the phrase, Compleynt of Mars, line 9. But other formulae of this brief selection are more obviously inappropriate. The appearance of Achilles’ name in rime, in line 96 of Troy Book i, calls out platly this no les as a balancing tag ; the use of wordes softe, ii:2786, drives Lydgate to lowe and nat alofte to fill his couplet. The eyen clere or eyen glade of Trojan women are used more than once in padding phrases, for which Chaucer’s Troilus iv :663 may have been authorization ; and the formula for sour or swete appears three times in the poem, for sote or sour twice, by south and not by east once. This last, v:2102, is an exception to Lydgate’s usual pro- cedure in couplet, which is to put his clumsy padding in the earlier of the two lines. In his stanza-work, especially in the Fall of Princes, the padding phrase occurs anywhere and everywhere; some stanzas have as many as three half-line formulae, while tags filling an entire line I have not attempted to catalogue. Schick said of Lydgate that “his rime is in general pure, and skilfully handled.” That the bulk of the monk’s work is accurately rimed no student denies; but correctness is not skill, and such pairs as multitude: platly to conclude, com- mendable: platly this no fable, such formulae as are above exemplified, are too frequent in Lydgate for us to term him “skilful” in rime-management. As all readers know, Chaucer made free use of rime-tags; and it is easy to believe that Lydgate imitated him in this respect as he did in the use of the acephalous line, exaggerating both, driven partly by the pressure of compulsory translation to abuse of both. But it is not clear that Lydgate found Chaucerian precedent for some of his licenses in rime, for his fairly frequent assonances and for his riming of Troye:weye (woye) fourteen times in the Troy Book. In that same poem alone there are fifteen cases of assonance, nearly all of them on -ape:-ake. The one definite case in Chaucer, Troilus ii :884-6, is on -yke:-yte > but this is surely insufficient to establish for Lydgate his right to a license which he uses from the Black Knight to the Secrees, all through his work. The great number of “Chaucerian” formulae adopted by Lydgate would in itself lead a student to argue Chaucer’s influence on the monk; but his imitations and borrowings of Chaucerian material and his frequent allusions to his “master” *Or by “And ferther over now ayenward yit”, Troilus iv: 1027, which represents Boethius’ “atque e converso rursus.” BO ie JOHN LYDGATE are proof positive. The detailed story of Lydgate’s dependence on Chaucer is still to be written; and in appraising the facts we have to bear in mind several aspects of medieval literature. The regulation tone of humility towards patron or master must be remembered; the tone of Lydgate towards Chaucer must be compared with that which he uses toward Guido or Boccaccio; the tone of Hoc- cleve, of the Palladius-translator, etc., must be paralleled with that of Lydgate. It is fairly easy to differentiate the three men’s attitude to Humphrey of Glou- cester, for instance. The slightness and formality of Hoccleve’s connection with him, the conventional pomposity of most of Lydgate’s allusions and the sudden warmth of his personal gratitude for money-gifts, the odd little glimpses of Humphrey in the Palladius-epilogues and the translator’s sycophantic address of his patron (i:1194) as— But God me semeth best thou mayst resemble ffor verite Iustice and mansuetude, are differences which mean degrees in the nearness of the three writers to the duke, and differences in their usage of stereotyped forms. In the attitude of Chaucer’s two pupils toward him there is much more resemblance in tone, although Hoccleve’s three allusions in the De Regimine—his only mentions of his master— have a warmth of personal affection and grief not to be found in Lydgate’s many passages of praise. It is to be noted, as regards the amount of allusion by the two pupils, that most of Lydgate’s are in long poems parallelizing work by Chau- cer, such as the Siege of Thebes, the Troy Book, and the Fall of Princes; that Hoccleve’s short religious and occasional compositions afforded no such oppor- tunity for mention of the elder poet as did his one long poem, the De Regimine, in which the allusions appear. Also we remark that both this poem and Lydgate’s Troy Book were executed for Henry the Fifth; since Hoccleve did not hesitate to insert a picture of Chaucer into his poem, is it not a fair surmise that Henry professed interest in Chaucer and favored allusion to him? The Siege of Thebes, written as it was to supplement the Canterbury Tales, is naturally dependent on Chaucer. The prologue is an inept imitation of Chau- cer’s; the story narrates in detail the events which Chaucer had summarized in a few lines of the Knight’s Tale. The poem entire is therefore a homage to the elder writer, and so far as we yet know a homage paid on the monk’s own initiative. That it was written with the Knight’s Tale near Lydgate’s hand is evident from the crowding of Chaucer-phrases between Thebes 4480 and 4540; but that the Canterbury Tales-prologue was not so consulted for the Thebes-prologue is arguable from the lack of such direct liftings and from Lydgate’s confusion of the Pardoner and the Summoner. With the Troy Book and the Fall of Princes, frequent as are allusions to Chaucer, we cannot be sure that Henry the Fifth and Gloucester, the monk’s patrons, are not as much in his mind. The passages about women, in both poems, are as obviously attuned to the patron’s ear as are the laudatory prologues and epilogues; the emphasis in the Troy Book on armor, on heraldic device, on methods of warfare and of encampment, is planned for the taste of King Henry just as the dissertations on literature in the Fall of Princes are adapted to Gloucester. For instance, in the latter work, Lydgate prefixes to its fourth book a long discourse in praise of writing and writers; he takes some of his generalities from John of Salisbury, but the particular cases, I would sug- JOHN LYDGATE 91 gest, are derived from Gloucester’s own library.!. For in the catalogue of books given by Humphrey to Oxford a few years later are included not only John of Salisbury’s Polycraticus and many of the Latin classics, but a Librum Dantes, a Commentaria Dantes, and many volumes of Petrarch; while in this prologue are discussed the Latin works of Petrarch and the writings of Virgil and of Cicero, with a meager but interesting allusion to Dante’s Commedia. I would think it possible that Lydgate was here aiming at his patron’s taste, perhaps obeying that patron’s command. In any case, the opinion of the patron has to be considered in estimating the allusions to Chaucer which are made by Hoccleve and by Lydgate. Some of the briefer mentions of Chaucer in the Fall of Princes arise from the context. Among the unfortunates in Boccaccio’s long procession are several included by Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women, the Monk’s Tale, and the Doctor’s Tale ;—Lucretia, Philomena, Dido, Virginia, Cleopatra, Caesar, Nero, Zenobia, Ugolino. Lydgate’s approach to these various tragedies differs. For Philomena (i:1786 ff.) and for Antony and Cleopatra (vi:3620 ff.) he declares that Thyng onys said be labour of Chauceer Wer presumpcioun me to make ageyn, and sends his readers to the “legende of martirs off Cupide.” For the story of Zenobia (viii:666 ff.) Lydgate says that because Chaucer has “compendiousli told al,” he will pass it over; he devotes, however, some sixty lines to her. When he is dealing with Caesar’s fall (vi:2815 ff.), with Nero (vii:600 ff.), with Dido (ii :1898 ff.), and with Virginia (i1:1345 ff.), we hear nothing of Chaucer. In his two introductions of Lucretia (1i:1002 ff., iii:960 ff.), the second only fol- lows Laurent’s French; the former, suggested by Laurent’s mention of Junius Brutus, in a list of high-couraged men, as Lucretia’s avenger on Tarquin, is ac- companied by Lydgate’s refusal to tell her story because Chaucer has already done so; but this refusal is set aside at Gloucester’s command, and we have 43 stanzas of Lucrece’s farewell speech, taken, as Lydgate states, from Collucius, i.e., from a “declamation” by Coluccio Salutati.2 The scanty five lines given to Ugolino (ix :2049 ff.), not only make no mention of Chaucer but close with the remark “no mor of him I fynde”’; and the elaborate treatment of the Canace-story condemned by Chaucer carries no explanation of Lydgate’s reason for so doing. This variation in Lydgate’s treatment of Chaucer is paralleled by variation in the monk’s method of quoting his “master.” There are clumsinesses enough in *This suggestion derives support from the allusion to Dante and to Petrarch found in book iii:3858-9, in a short begging-letter chapter not preserved by all MSS, and perhaps worked by scribes into the portion of the text with which it had been sent to Gloucester. Note also the two fragments of Greek, ii:1855 and iv:568, not in Laurent’s French, with the copy of “Verba Graeca et interpretationes linguae Latinae”’ given to Oxford in 1443 by Humphrey with the Dante and the Petrarch books above mentioned. See Anstey’s Munimenta Academica, pp. 768-772, and see note below on the Lucrece-tragedy. *Writyng causeth the chaplet to be greene Bothe of Esope and of Iuuenal Dantis labour it doth also meynteene By a report verray celestial Sunge amonge Lombardis in especial Whos thre bookis the grete wondres tell Of heuene aboue of purgatorie & hell. iv :134-140 * See my paper in Modern Philology 25 :49-57. O2 JOHN LYDGATE Lydgate on occasion; it might be said that a man who renders line 80 of the Venus— Sith ryme in English hath swich scarsitee in the two forms— Syth bat in ryme ynglysch hath skarsete Troy Book ii:168, Seyn how that Ynglyssh in ryme hath skarsete FaPrinces ix :3312, is too careless and too obtuse to be considered a true admirer of Chaucer; it might be said that a man who (in Horns Away) confuses Alanus’ description of Nature and Chaucer’s description of Venus is no reader of the Parlement of Foules. Nevertheless, there are elsewhere in Lydgate, especially in the Black Knight, very faithful echoes of the Parlement; and at any moment in Lydgate there appear such phrases as “woful Myrrha,” ‘“vois memoriall,” “hateful harm,” “peple vnsad and euer vntrewe,” “pres hath envie,” “thoroughfare of woo,”— which must mean that reminiscences of his master’s text came easily and naturally into Lydgate’s memory. Considering this, and considering longer passages such as FaPrinces iv :2955-56 or St. Albon iii:457 ff., we can hardly assert that Lyd- gate’s knowledge of Chaucer was superficial. We may find fault with Mr. Ches- terton for talking of the “rescue of Miss Lammle,’ and point out that he has confused poor futile little Georgiana Podsnap with the designing Lammle-couple who tried to entrap her; but we should not be justified in saying that Mr. Chester- ton has thus demonstrated his ignorance of Dickens. The present question re- solves itself into a weighing of quantity against quality; and so far as I can now see, the amount of Lydgate’s conscious and unconscious citation of Chaucer is great enough to prove his industrious reading of the elder poet. Classical authors have indeed exerted small influence on Lydgate’s text, with the noteworthy exception of Ovid,—the more noteworthy because the Bury St. Edmunds library, although rich for its time in classics, contained apparently no Ovid. Their influence, or that of any writer on Lydgate, may be considered under one of four categories:—his translation of an entire work, his insertion of a long borrowed passage, his adoption of details from a classic into a work derived mainly from other sources, the recurrence all through his productivity of phrasal echoes. It is this last, as we have just seen, which clearly proves the power of Chaucer over Lydgate; taken in conjunction with the continual use of Chaucerian rime-tags and the steady abuse of a specifically Chaucerian line-type, it shows the pressure of Chaucer on a mind imitative, repetitive, careless, but none the less honestly admiring. No classical writer exerts any such influence on Lydgate. : There is only one classical writer, indeed, who can be said to exert any in- fluence on Lydgate,—Ovid. Other writers of the ancient world are names or nearly names, especially the Greeks. Homer is for Lydgate, as for Chaucer, the honeymouthed father of song and the too-partial champion of Achilles; Plato holds the key “fof dyvyn Ideie”; Euripides and Demosthenes are mentioned in dependence on Laurent’s French; Aristotle, except in the pseudo-Aristotelian 1Lydgate’s statement, FaPrinces, i:6452, that Samson’s hair was cut by Dalila diverges from Judges xvi:17, where she “vocavit tonsorem,’ toward Chaucer’s indefinite phrase in MoTale 77 that she “made to clippe” the sleeper’s hair. Also note how the account of the Broche of Thebes, FaPrinces i:324-5, is influenced by Chaucer’s Mars 245-50. JOHN LYDGATE 93 letter to Alexander, is as much a name as is Homer. Of the Latins, Virgil is less poet and more sorcerer to Lydgate than to Chaucer; Horace is unknown, as he was to Chaucer; Livy and Juvenal are names, as is Persius; Statius is nominal authority for the Theban story, but was probably no more used at first hand than was Boccaccio for the Fall of Princes. The subjects of several of Seneca’s tragedies are known to Lydgate, and as moralist he is also often men- tioned, but not so often as is Cicero (“Tullius”), from whom, however, but one ( ?) passage is quoted. Ovid only, of the classics, has to any degree passed into the fabric of Lydgate’s work. He is frequently mentioned in the Fall of Princes, contrary to the practice of Lydgate’s French source; and not only are Laurent’s mythological narratives sometimes altered to follow the Metamorphoses, but Ovid’s lines are on occasion translated and interwoven with the English. It should be emphasized that all this happens in the Fall of Princes, and that the less conventional of Lydgate’s classical allusions are nearly all to be found there. Not only is the list of Chaucer’s work in that poem, but lists of the writ- ings of Virgil, Cicero, Petrarch, etc., and whatever Lydgate knows about Dante. The prologues and epilogues to other poems, e.g., St. Edmund, and one of Lyd- gate’s mummings, are liberally seasoned with a mixture of Helicon, Clio, Aurora, Polyphemus, Socrates, Tullius, Homer, and Atropos, but in an entirely lifeless and routine-fashion. The Fall of Princes allusions have some slender vitality in them, and for that vitality, I believe, Humphrey of Gloucester was largely re- sponsible. The heavy task which he assigned to his protégé did indeed crush Lydgate’s verse and style to worse than a dead level much of the time; but it was Gloucester who ordered Lydgate to read and use Coluccio Salutati, Gloucester who spurred Lydgate to talk about literature occasionally instead of about morality all the time, Gloucester for whom the attempts at humor were constructed, Glou- cester whose library included both Petrarch and Dante. The interpolations from Salutati and from John of Salisbury in the Fall of Princes, the prologue to book iv with its catalogues, are of no literary value; but they are of a better substance than is the interpolation about false gods, in Troy Book ii, from Isidor. Lydgate’s knowledge of Petrarch or of Dante was infinitesimal, but that a cloistered monk of his time should have that minute particle is of interest. We cannot, it is true, understand why Lydgate should know so little of Dante and of Boethius, when he found their names so clearly-cut in Chaucer. Occasion- ally we think we hear a Dante-echo in him; the lines Troy Book iv:3014 ff. run much as does the “Taccia Lucan omai” of Inferno 25:94 ff.; but the contact is with Chaucer’s MerchTale 488 ff. The most famous of all Dante-passages, para- phrased by Tennyson as “A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things,’ comes to mind when we find in FaPrinces i :645-6,— For thilke sorwe surmountith euery sorwe Which next folwith afftir felicite,— but Lydgate derives proximately from Chaucer’s Troilus 111:1625-28, ultimately from the De Consolatione ii, prose 4. Of his several repetitions of the thought, FaPrinces 1:3529-30, iii:722-24, iv:2308-10, only the second has the notion of remembrance as in Chaucer and in Dante; yet Lydgate’s direct dependence upon Boethius is less likely than inexactness of Chaucer-memory on his part. For his 94 JOHN LYDGATE knowledge of Boethius, except for one translated bit, is surprisingly small and colorless ; see p. 185 here. Other reading by Lydgate shows itself hardly more than in his following of a prescribed source, be it saint’s life, Dance of Death, or Guido delle Colonne’s Trojan story. There is one mention of Gower (FaPrinces ix:3410), but the allusion is only a citation from Chaucer; and although Macaulay has pointed out that the Glasgow MS of the Confessio Amantis is supposed to have come from the Bury library, the only hint of Lydgate’s Gower-knowledge is his telling of the Canace-story. Hampole has just a mention. We do not here discuss Lydgate’s Biblical knowledge, or his use of Josephus; but his reading of English writers outside Chaucer, or of. any classical writer outside Ovid, is not proved. The extent of his acquaintance with such medieval writers as Fulgentius, John of Salisbury, or Isidor of Seville, is, not yet investigated; his interpolation from Isidor into the Troy Book, and his other mentions of the Spanish encyclopedist, have especial interest when we recall the copy of Isidor’s Synonyma in the Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 233, on the last leaf of which is written “Sciant presentes ac futuri quod ego Iohannis Lydgate,” and on the first leaf ‘Liber monachorum sancti Edmundi.” The use which Lydgate makes of his reading is mechanical, and he is always the ecclesiastic. He censures the vices of his time as a Churchman censures, not with desire to cleanse society for society’s sake, but with desire that society shall submit to the Church. One thing of which he feels real personal horror is dissen- sion within the State; to that subject he returns again and again, throughout all his work; and if the prose Serpent of Division be his, to that subject he has devoted a special tractate. The quarrels of kinsmen are so often lamented by Lydgate, the recoil of a bloody deed on its perpetrator so often emphasized, that it is impossible not to connect his strong feeling in these respects with the state of his times. Yet his direct allusions to contemporary history are not many; ctf. for instance FaPrinces viii:2457. And although his general political ideas were doubtless ultra-conservative, he is too vague a thinker to grasp the full meaning of some passages which he quotes. Laurent, with similar insensitiveness, had translated for the duke of Berri, in his second book, all the vehement republicanism of Boccaccio against tyrants; and although Lydgate does indeed at this point sub- stitute a long digression on “the body politic’ from ?John of Salisbury, he later (FaPrinces ix :1443-46) says, quite in Boccaccio’s key, Philisophres and poetis eek deuise In ther sawes prudent and notable Blood of tirauntis is noble sacrefise To God aboue whan thei be vengable. There is enough of this language about tyrants in the churchman John of Salis- bury! to give the fifteenth-century mind, either aristocratic or ecclesiastical, a view of the denunciation as a formula. It assuredly never occurred either to Laurent or to Lydgate that he could arouse any indignant feeling in his patron by copying the quotation. Lydgate’s own idea of the poet’s duty is independently expressed in the Fall of Princes iii :3830-36 ; he says— Ther cheeff labour is vicis to repreue With a maner couert similitude 1See Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny, Cambridge, 1925. JOHN LYDGATE 95 And non estat with ther language greeve Bi no rebukyng of termys dul and rude What euer thei write on vertu ay conclude Appeire no man in no maner wise This thoffice of poetis that be wise. The same mixture of tone runs all through his work. He insists on the “poraile” as the support of monarchy more than once and more than twice, but his language about the instability of the commons is the same as that of Chaucer ; and his hor- ror of a churl in power is almost as great as his horror of civil dissension, al- though he praises natural “gentilesse” as Chaucer had praised it. Lydgate is, in fact, too little politician or satirist to have a consistent tone. In minor or more personal aspects, Lydgate has been praised for his ten- derness toward children, for his defence of women, for his strong nature-feeling ; we are told that he can be both deeply pathetic and admirably humorous, and that on occasion he can show “a stiller kind of majesty.” The first-named is indeed one of his most engaging qualities; he rarely mentions a child without dwelling on its smallness, its softness, its helplessness, even its smile. He may spoil his pictures by accompanying ineptitudes, as in the Canace-letter, but his feeling is real; and on such passages, or on, e.g., the (overlong) dying speech of Polyxena in Troy Book iv:6731 ff., rests much of his claim to command of pathos. His “humor” is almost entirely bound up with his language about women; and here the longer passages are a less trustworthy guide than the shorter. In the Troy Book he frequently bewails Guido’s wicked anti-feminist tongue, and follows a lengthy attack on women, translated from the Latin, by 2 lengthier defense and a hearty rating of his author. But more than a few touches elsewhere in the work, touches of mock courtesy or of michievous comment, show that the poet’s eye was on Henry the Fifth, and that he was alert to provide entertainment for his patron. Compare for instance the meeting of Jason and Medea or of Helen and Paris; and in the Fall of Princes the monkish jocularity over Orpheus’ loss of his wife, i:5825-31, or the jest as to the fewness of good women, 1:1805, 2849, etc., or the line closing the description of Candalus’ queen, saying that Nature, busy in augmenting her beauty, “hadde forget for to make hir trewe.” In these and other sex-gibes (cf. the Mumming at Hertford, also done as aristocratic amusement) is to be found the bulk of Lydgate’s attempts at humor; and these are precisely in the medieval tradition, as is the contradic- tion between them and the lavish praise of woman, e.g., in the Flower of Cour- tesy. The ecclesiastic who both worshipped the Virgin Mother and shrank from every woman as the daughter of mischief-making Eve saw no incongruity in his pictures of woman. Lydgate’s nature-pictures are also of a mixed character. They often have a sort of freshness, especially the many of the Troy Book; but they are nearly always drawn with the help of mythology and of astronomy, servants who can easily overpower a master not possessed of word-magic. Chaucer had been suc- cessful as he opened the Canterbury Tales, but Lydgate is only at times partially successful. Here, as always in his work, the edge of sensation is not keen enough to bring the blood of real expression. Very rarely do we find a happy epithet, as in “smooth rain” or the “restless stone” of Sisyphus. There are two lines in the Troy Book, iii:2746-48, which remind us of Keats’s “early sobbing of 96 JOHN LYDGATE the morn,” just as other passages seem to have given a hint to Shakespeare.' There is, very infrequently, a bit of real observation, such as the description of smoking lime, Troy Book iv :5927-28, or the several allusions to leaderless sheep; and the picture of convent-robbers in St. Edmund may owe its existence to actual experience. See also the (muddled) metaphor of harrowed soil in Fa- Princes ix :691-2, and best of all the line FaPrinces iii:252, where Lydgate says to the hated figure of Poverty, wandering from door to door, “And many a dogge hath on thi staff ignawe.” Laurent spoke only of “barking dogs.” Dulness of sense-perception on the one hand, the weight of stereotyped formula on the other, hold down Lydgate’s feeling for nature just as they hold down his nar- rative progress. Nearly all his work is lifeless. He did fairly well in beast-fables such as the Churl and the Bird, still better in the Horse, Goose, and Sheep, but failed completely in his Aesop stories. His religious narratives, except perhaps St. Margaret, are weakly done; St. Edmund is particularly wooden, although not so hopelessly bad as the Guy of Warwick. The longer romantic narratives, al- though unsteadily handled, and heavy with repetitions, have points of interest. In one channel only, the religious lyric, did the monk find occasionally free ut- terance; passages of the Testament, especially where Lydgate imagines his Savior as addressing him, have real sincerity and power. But it was upon his two long narrative poems that the fame of Lydgate rested in the century after his death. The influence of the Troy Book is marked on Metham’s Amoryus and Cleopes; Caxton not only professed himself un- worthy to bear Lydgate’s inkhorn, when taking up the tale of Troy, but echoed the monk’s phraseology in the proheme to his second edition of the Canterbury Tales and lavished praise on his “master” in his Book of Curtesye (see EETS ed., pp. 36-40). Lydgate was diligently read by Hawes, who is said to have known much of his verse by heart, and to have entertained Henry the Seventh therewith. The Fall of Princes was imitated by Cavendish, by the writers of A Mirror for Magistrates, and by Barclay; the reprint of it in 1554 and of the Troy Book in 1555 came close in time to the publication of Hardyng’s Chronicle, to the third edition of Fabyan’s Chronicle, and to the upgrowth of the English chronicle-play. In the seventeenth century Heywood rewrote the Troy Book as the Life and Death of Hector, and John Lane, the continuator of the Squire’s Tale, published a supposed rewriting of Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick, in which the monk appears as prologue and epilogue. Those functions, and that of Chorus, Lydgate had already filled in Tarlton’s lost play of the Seven Deadly Sins. He appears, with Gower and Chaucer, in Ben Jonson’s masque of the Golden Age Restored, and with them is cited by Jonson in his Grammar. The association of Lydgate’s name with Chaucer’s, or with those of Gower and Chaucer, was long the rule. The fifteenth century apparently marked no difference between them. Hoccleve mentions Gower with Chaucer, terming him also “master,” though with no such personal warmth as he gives to his language about Chaucer. Bokenam, in the prologue to his life of St. Agnes, makes * With Troy Book ii:8197, where the bloody battleground is described as “That first was grene turned into red,” or with the same phrasing i:4100-01, Thebes 2305-6, cp. Macbeth ii,2 :64, “Making the green one red.” With Troy Book iii :5662, “As he lyuede in his apparaile,” cp. Hamlet iii,4:134, “in his habit as he lived.” JOHN LYDGATE 97 Pallas say that her fresh flowers have all been gathered by Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate, the third of whom yet lives. Burgh, although he begins his ad- dress of homage to Lydgate with a line which is ultimately Chaucer’s, makes no mention of the elder poet in his list of famous rhetoricians, and terms Lydgate the flower and treasure of poetry. The unknown writer of the poem published p. 198 here calls Lydgate the fit successor of Chaucer; and the writer of How a Lover Praiseth His Lady, while commending Chaucer warmly, mentions Gower, Lydgate, Ovid, and Statius along with him. George Ashby wrote of ‘“Maisters Gower, Chaucer and Lydgate, Primier poetes of this nacion’”; and Forrest in the prologue to his Joseph names the three together. Hawes lavishes praise on Lydgate, and it is not until Skelton’s Philip Sparrow that we find a discrimi- nation among the three elder poets. From the 1558 edition of the Fall of Princes through the seventeenth cen- tury there are no reprints of Lydgate except those of his poems which are carried along under Chaucer’s name in the editions by Speght. But John Dart, modernizing the Black Knight in 1718, proclaimed Lydgate the greatest poet that England (or perhaps the world) had ever produced,—an opinion not shared by the candid Mrs. Cooper, editor of The Muses’ Library, who in 1737 remarked that she had “waded through” a large volume of his work without finding any of the supposed equality with Chaucer. In 1802 Ritson called Lydgate “a vol- uminous, prosaic, and drivelling monk”; but Gray, in his essay on Lydgate, written much earlier but printed 1814, attributes the “long processes” of the monk’s writing to the taste of his time, and praises him for his power of raising tender emotion and for a frequent “stiller kind of majesty” in expression. Lowell termed Lydgate’s verse “a barbarous jangle’; and both Gosse and Saintsbury, in their histories of English literature, have spoken of his intolerable prolixity and his deficient metrical ear, although Gosse, as already noted, adds that a selection could probably be made which would do him greater credit than does the whole mass. Gosse also mentions appreciatively the gentleness and sympathy for which Gray had praised Lydgate; but Churton Collins, in our own day, has far outdone Gray in the warmth of his commendation. He declares that Lydgate was a poet of fine genius, that his descriptions of nature almost rival Chaucer’s, that his powers of pathos are of a high order, that his style and verse are often of exquisite beauty, and that, at his best, he is one of the most musical of poets. Of such an estimate of Lydgate it can only be said that the perspective of English poetry must have disappeared from before the eyes of a man who applies to Lydgate words better applicable to Keats. If we turn from the opinions of single critics to the testimony of the press, we find that while about seventy MSS of the Canterbury Tales and sixteen of Troilus survive, there are forty of Hoccleve’s De Regimine Principum and thirty of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, of Lydgate’s Troy Book about a score, still extant. Caxton, who printed the Canterbury Tales twice and Troilus once, issued Lyd- gate’s Horse, Goose, and Sheep thrice, the Churl and Bird twice, the Temple of Glass and the Life of Our Lady once each; also a few brief poems, perhaps as “fillers.” Wynkyn de Worde published the Canterbury Tales twice and the Troilus once, the Temple of Glass three times and the Churl and Bird, the Horse, Goose, and Sheep, the Black Knight, the Siege of Thebes, and the Virtues of the Mass, once each; he also put out a set of extracts from the Fall of Princes, from Chaucer, etc., as “The prouerbes of Lydgate.” It was Richard Pynson who 98 JOHN LYDGATE undertook Lydgate’s longer poems, printing both the Troy Book (1513) and two editions of the Fall of Princes, 1494 and 1527; he also reissued the Temple of Glass and the Churl and Bird, and printed the Testament. Minor printers issued, between 1515 and 1531, the Legend of St. Austin at Compton, the Life of St. Albon, and the Life of Our Lady. In the years between 1554 and 1558 there was a sudden “boom” in Lydgate’s longer poems, the Fall of Princes ap- pearing in 1554 and 1558, the Troy Book in 1555; but thereafter, for nearer three hundred than two hundred years, only a few of Lydgate’s shorter poems and the Siege of Thebes remained in print, carried along with Chaucer in the editions of 1561 and following. In 1818, 1822, the Roxburghe Club reprinted, as literary rarities, Lydgate’s Horse, Goose, and Sheep, his Churl and Bird, and his Black Knight; in 1827 Nicolas’ Chronicle of London, in 1859 Wright’s Political Poems, included several texts by Lydgate or ascribed to him; in 1840 the first collection of the monk’s shorter poems was edited by J. O. Halliwell for the Percy Society,— a task most indifferently performed. Since 1864, when the Early English Text Society began publishing, texts of Lydgate have been steadily appearing ; for them and for the poems edited by German doctorate-candidates, see the appended Select List of the monk’s works. Various collections of Middle English verse have also included work by Lydgate, e.g., Skeat’s Chaucerian and Other Pieces (vol. vii of the Oxford Chaucer), Horstmann’s Altenglische Le- genden, Neilson and Webster’s Chief British Poets of the Fourteen and Fifteenth Centuries. Criticism of Lydgate :— Thomas Gray’s essay, in Gosse’s ed. of Gray’s Works, vol. i. Warton’s Hist. Eng. Poetry, in Warton-Hazlitt ed., iii:53 ff. Morley’s English Writers, vol. vi. Ward’s English Poets vol. i; ten Brink’s Hist. Eng. Lit., vol. ii; Jusserand’s Literary Hist. of the Eng. People, i:498-501; brief treatments by Gosse and by Saintsbury in their short hists. of English literature; Courthope in his Hist. Eng. Poetry, vol. i; Saintsbury in Cambridge Hist. Eng. Lit., vol. ii, chap. on The English Chaucerians. Sidney Lee’s article in the DictNat- Biog. is compact, but needs revision, especially on the bibliographical side. The extravagant praise of Churton Collins in his Ephemera Critica, e.g., pp. 98, 115, 199, does not carry conviction to a careful student. Schick’s introd. to his EETS ed. of the Temple of Glass is still the best guide to knowledge of Lydgate. Koeppel’s monographs on the Fall of Princes (see p. 151 here, foot) and on the Siege of Thebes (p. 120) are of value; that by E. Gattinger on Die Lyrik Lydgates, Vienna, 1896, is unsound. Essays on Special Points :— F. Reuss, Das Naturgefiihl bei Lydgate, in Archiv 122 :269-300. Moorman, Interpretation of Nature in Eng. Poetry, Quellen u. Forschungen, vol. 95 (1905). See chap. 9. G. Reismiiller, Romanische Lehnworter bei Lydgate, Munich, 1909. R. Hingst, Die Sprache Lydgates aus seinen Reimen, Greifswald, 1908. A. H. Licklider, Chapters on the Metric of the Chaucerian Acar: Balti- more, 1910. H. Reger, Die epische Casur in der Chaucerschule, Bayreuth, 1910. JOHN LYDGATE 99 C. F. Babcock, The Metrical Use of Inflectional -e in Middle English, with par- ticular reference to Chaucer and Lydgate, in PMLA 29:50 ff. A. L. McCobb, The Loss of Unaccented -e in the Transition Period, in PMLA 29 :39-41. E. Hiittmann, Das partic. prasens bei Lydgate im Vergleich mit Chaucers Ge- brauch, Kiel diss., 1914. . Courmont, Studies on Lydgate’s Syntax in the Temple of Glass, Paris, 1912. . Hittmair, Das Zeitwort “do” in Chaucers Prosa, Leipzig, 1923. See pp. 85-91. P. Hammond, The Nine-Syllabled Pentameter Line in some Post-Chaucerian MSS, in ModPhil 23 :129-52. > THE CANON The larger part of the work attributed to Lydgate may with tolerable cer- tainty be treated as his; but a number of poems assigned to him, from the day of Hawes to our own, are doubtful or more than doubtful. Hawes, in his Pastime of Pleasure, stanzas 184-187, mentioned eight poems by the monk; for the passage see p. 281 here, and the Notes. More business-like bibliographies, so far as intention is considered, are to be found in :— John Bale, Scriptorum illustrium Maioris Brytannie ——Catalogus, 1557. See pp. 586-7. John Bale, Index Britanniae Scriptorum, ed. from the MS notebook of Bale by R. L. Poole and Mary Bateson, Oxford, 1902. See pp. 228-231. John Stow’s list of 112 works by Lydgate appended to the text of the Siege of Thebes in Speght’s 1598 Chaucer. Stow cited usually from MSS, and is better worth heeding than is the flimsiness of Bale. John Pits, Relationum Historicarum de Rebus Anglicis, tomus primus, Paris, 1619. See pp. 632-34. Based on Bale. Thomas Tanner, Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, ed. David Wilkins, 1748. See pp. 489-93 for long list of Eng. titles and MS-references. For discussion of the above, see H. N. MacCracken’s EETS ed. of the Minor Poems of Lydgate, vol. 1, 1911, xxxiv-xlii. Joseph Ritson, in his Bibliographia Anglo-Poetica, 1802, printed a list of 251 “works” supposedly by Lydgate; this list Schick, in his EETS ed. of the Temple of Glass, 1891, pp. cxlvili-cliii, justly denounces as an “Augean stable of disorder, glaring mistakes, and inextricable confusion.” Ritson was criticised and a new list prepared by MacCracken in an essay on the Lydgate Canon prefixed to his EETS volume above mentioned. This study I have elsewhere (Anglia Beiblatt 24:140- 145) reviewed as not sufficiently judicial; a number of poems are added to the canon on Dr. MacCracken’s opinion alone,—the subjective method for which we censure Stow’s treatment of Chaucer. The list of Lydgate’s works in the DictNatBiog., s.v. Lydgate suffers from lack of method, and has frequent inaccuracies. Notes contributory to the establishment of a Lydgate-canon will be found in Anglia 28 :1-28 (1905), Anglia 30:320-48 (1907). 100 JOHN LYDGATE SELECT LIST of Lydgate’s longer or more frequently mentioned poems; for the many short poems bearing no definite titles, and for the shorter religious poems, see MacCracken’s ed. of the Minor Poems, EETS vol. i; and see his prefixed essay on the canon. Aesop, Fables of, ed. Sauerstein, in Anglia 9:1-24 (1886) ; ed. Zupitza, in Archiv 85:1- 28. See Sauerstein, Ueber Lydgates Aesopusuebersetzung, Halle diss., 1885. Albon and Amphabell (Saints), ed. Horstmann, Berlin, 1882. Assembly of Gods (probably not by Lydgate), ed. Triggs, EETS, 1895. See Rudolph, Lydgate und die Assembly of Gods, Berlin, 1909. See my Chaucer Manual, p. 407. Austin, St. at Compton. In Halliwell, p. 135; in MacCracken, i:193. Black Knight, Complaint of the. For early eds. with Chaucer see my Manual, pp. 413-15. Poem ed. Skeat vii:245; ed. Krausser, in Anglia 19:211-290. Bycorne and Chichevache. In Dodsley’s Old Plays, 1780, vol. 12; in Halliwell, p. 129, repr. Neilson and Webster, p. 220; in this volume, p. 113. Churl and Bird. In Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 1652; repr. from Caxton for Roxburghe Club, 1818; in Halliwell, p. 179, repr. Neilson and Webster, p. 208; in this volume, p. 102. Corpus Christi, Procession of. In Halliwell, p. 95; in MacCracken, i:35. Court of Sapience. Probably not by Lydgate. See p. 258 here. Dance Macabre. In Bergen’s ed. of the Fall of Princes, p. 1025; in this volume, p. 124 Departing of Chaucer. In Notes and Queries 1872 i:381; in app. vi to Furnivall’s EETS ed. of Thynne’s Animadversions; in ModPhil 1:331, repr. by Ruud in his brochure on Thomas Chaucer, 1926, p. 119. Dietary. See the EETS Babees Book, p. 54; in Halliwell, p. 66; repr. Neilson and Web- ster, p. 221. See MacCracken’s essay on the canon. Edmund and Fremund (Saints). In Hortsmann’s Altenglische Legenden, Heilbronn, 1881, p. 376. Fall of Princes, ed. Bergen, Carnegie Instit. and EETS, 1923-27. See pp. 150 ff. here. Falls of Seven Princes. In EnglStudien 43:10. Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, ed. Zupitza-Schleich, Vienna, 1897. To MacCracken’s list of MSS add Cambridge Univ. Hh iv, 12. Flower of Courtesy, ed. Skeat vii: 266. See my Chaucer Manual, p. 424. George, Saint. In Engl. Studien 43:10; in MacCracken, i:145. Giles, Saint. In Horstmann, Altengl. Legenden, p. 371; in MacCracken, i:161. Gloucester, Complaint for My Lady of. In Anglia 27:381. By Lydgate? Gloucester, Epithalamium for. In Anglia 27 :385; in this volume, p. 142. Gloucester, Letter to. In Nicolas, Chron. of London, 1827; in Halliwell, p. 49; in this volume, p. 149. Guy of Warwick. Text of MS Laud 683 ed. Zupitza, Vienna, 1873; text of Harvard Univ. 530 F, in John Shirley’s hand, ed. F. N. Robinson, Harv. Studies v:197- 213 (1896). Bit in Zupitza’s Alt u. Mittelengl. Uebungsbuch, repr. Maclean’s Old and Middle Eng. Reader, 1898. Henry VI, Coronation Poem. In Wright, Polit. Poems, ii:141. Henry VI, Entry into London. In Ellis’ ed. of Fabyan’s Chronicle, 1811; in Nicolas’ Chron. of London, 1827; in Halliwell, p. 1; in Archiv 126:75; in Kingsford’s Chronicles of London, 1905. On the roundel of the poem see Archiv 96:191. Henry VI, Pedigree of. In Wright, Polit. Poems, ii:131. Horns Away. In this volume, p. 110, where see refs. Horse, Goose, and Sheep. The de Worde print is repr. Roxburghe Club, 1822. Poem ed. Degenhart, Leipzig, 1900. In EETS PolitReligLovePoems (1903), p. 15. Kings of England, Verses on. In Gairdner’s Histor. Collections, 1876; in Three Fif- teenth Cent. Chronicles, 1880. To MacCracken’s list of MSS add Trin. College Dublin 516, Hatfield 281, Lambeth 306. JOHN LYDGATE 101 Life of Our Lady. No modern ed. yet available. To MacCracken’s list of MSS add Durham V, ii, 16, Hunterian U, 3, 5 at Glasgow, a portion in Huntington 144 (formerly Huth), etc. London Lickpenny. Probably not by Lydgate. In this volume, p. 237, q. v. Margaret, Life of St. In Horstmann, Altengl. Legenden, p. 446; in MacCracken, ZS: Margaret, see Queen Margaret. Mass, The Lover’s. Probably not by Lydgate. See p. 207 here. Mass, Virtues of the. In Huth’s Fugitive Tracts, 1875; in MacCracken, i:87. Mumming at Hertford. In Anglia 22:364, repr. Neilson and Webster p. 223. The other mummings by Lydgate are in Brotanek’s Englische Maskenspiele, 1902. These clumsy but historically important poems were long supposed lost. Nightingale Poems, Two, ed. Glauning, EETS, 1900. See Anglia Beiblatt 16 :360. Order of Fools. In Halliwell, p. 164. In the EETS Booke of Precedence, p. 79. Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, EETS, 1899-1904. Prospect of Peace. In Wright, Polit. Poems, ii :209. Queen Margaret’s Entry into London. By Lydgate? Texts printed by Carleton Brown in MLReview 7 :225, by Robt. Withington in ModPhil 13:53. Reason and Sensuality, ed. Sieper, EETS, 1901. Secrees of Olde Philisoffres, ed. Steele, EETS, 1894. Corrections by Prosiegel, Book of the Governance of Kings, Munich diss., 1903. Stans Puer ad Mensam. In Reliquiae Antiquae, i:156; in EETS Babees Book, p. 26; in EETS Booke of Precedence, p. 56. Temple of Glass, ed. Schick, EETS, 1891. An extract from Schick is in Neilson and Webster, p. 213. See MacCracken in PMLA 23:129-40; see Courmont as p. 99 ante. Testament. In Halliwell, p. 232; in MacCracken, 1:329. Thebes, Siege of, or Story of, ed. Erdmann, EETS, 1911, text. Prologue in Wiilker’s Altengl. Lesebuch, ii:105 (from Stow of 1561); in Anglia 36:360; in Spurgeon’s Chaucer Allusion i:26-31; and p. 118 here. See my Chaucer Manual, p. 456. A selection from part ii is in Skeat’s Specimens Eng. Lit. 1394-1579. Troy Book, ed. Bergen, EETS, 1906-08, text. A bit is repr. by Neilson and Web- ster, p. 216. For Lydgate’s prose work, see MacCracken’s ed. of the Serpent of Division, Oxford, 1911, and note by same in MLReview 8:103. See, in the Harvard MS 530 F, a continuation of the prose Brut, or chronicle of England, which the copyist John Shirley in a long heading asserts to be the work of Lydgate. This heading is printed Harvard Studies v:185. Besides the Assembly of Gods, the Court of Sapience, the Lover’s Mass, London Lickpenny, etc., many other works have been falsely ascribed to Lydgate. Walton’s translation of Boethius was credited to Lydgate as noted on p. 39 here; Warton opined that the Coventry Corpus Christi Play was “very probably” by Lydgate, and Wright hinted his authorship of the Payne and Sorow of Euyll Maryage,—see p. 295 of Poems of Walter Mapes, Camden Soc., 1841. The prose transl. of the Pilgrimage of the Soul is frequently assigned to Lydgate, see Schick’s ed. of the Temple of Glass, p. ci; and this very dubious assignment is sanctioned by the New Eng. Dict. Other minor ascrip- tions are made by fifteenth-century scribes, and a major one by Henry Peachan, who in 1622 announced that Lydgate “wrote that bitter Satyre of Peirs Plowman”. Ritson’s pseudo-bibliography has been torn to pieces by Schick as cited, and the Canon-essay of MacCracken does not classify Lydgate’s works with regard to the quality of evidence for the monk’s authorship. THE CHURL AND THE BIRD The Churl and the Bird was one of the most popular of Lydgate’s shorter poems, and is among the eight works attributed to him by Hawes in his Pastime of Pleasure; see p. 281 here. It was printed by Caxton twice, by de Worde, by Copland, and by Pynson. Its exact source has not been identified; the French “paunflete” which Lydgate mentions in line 35 would hardly have been the long narrative compilation of Petrus Alfonsus’ Disciplina Clericalis in its French ren- dering Le Castoiement d’un Pére a son Fils, but some perhaps separate version of the single tale which it contains on this subject. The Castoiement’s recension of our story, which is nearer the English than is any other of the French ver- sions, mentions a peasant as owner of the garden, describes the song of the bird, its capture, and the dialogue leading to its release; it presents the three “wis- doms” as: 1) que tu ne creies pas A toz les diz que tu orras, 2) que tu avras Ce que toen ert ja ni faudras, 3) que ne deiz pas plorer Ne ne te deiz desconforter Se perdue as aucune rien—The churl’s despair is then described, the bird’s reproof given, and the bird departs. See the poem (156 lines) as printed in Labouderie’s ed. of the Disciplina, Paris, 1824, ii:130-36. This version, as ap- pears. is close to the English. Gaston Paris, in his Légendes du Moyen Age, essay on Le Lai d’Oiselet, prints and discusses a far fuller and more symmetrical French tale based on the same situation. In this version the garden depends for its existence upon the song of the bird, and although once the property of a chevalier, has now fallen into the hands of a “vilain”. The bird still sang in the garden her wonderful song, which was of duty to God, and that God and love are one, and that love is supported by loyalty, courtesy, and honor. As the bird sings she sees the listening churl, who is evil-minded and covetous; and therefore she pours out praises of her former hearers, the noble knights and ladies. This incenses the churl, who snares the bird. The story then continues as here, with the added detail that the churl scorns the bird’s three “wisdoms’’, and declares he is not so stupid as to need them. The rest of the narrative is as here, except that when the bird departs the beauty of the garden disappears, the streams and trees dry up, and the churl loses his all. This version may also be read in Barbazan and Méon’s Fabliaux, iii:114; although such a developed tale bears no relation to Lydgate’s source, it is interesting to note that when Elias Ashmole reprinted our poem in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum in 1652, he drew from it a “para- bolicall and allusive interpretation”—although an alchemical one. The date of the English rendering is uncertain. It has been suggested by Schick, page c of his edition of the Temple of Glass, that the translation was executed before the death of Chaucer, the allusion to “my maister” in line 380 being taken to mean Chaucer. But the argument is of doubtful validity. From the phrasing and movement of the poem we may, however, be inclined to place it early in Lydgate’s career; for it is much fresher and lighter than is, e.g., the fable of the Cock and Precious Stone, where the narrative is very poorly managed. Both this poem and Bycorne and Chichevache seem to us early just because of this (comparative) freshness of handling; or it may be that the choice of models in them is fortunate, for Lydgate and for us, since their con- [ 102 ] THE CHURL AND THE BIRD 103 nection with the Manciple’s tale or with the Clerk’s envoy stimulates the modern reader’s interest. My text is in the main from MS Longleat 258, of the Marquess of Bath’s library, for the use of which I am indebted to the present Lord Bath. Other copies are in Brit. Mus. Harley 116, Cotton Caligula A ii, Lansdowne 699; in Lansdowne’s partial sister Leyden Vossianus 9; in Hh iv, 12 and Kk i, 6 of the University Library Cambridge; in Trin. Coll. Cambridge R 3, 19; in Balliol College Oxford, and a fragment in Christ Church College Oxford 152; in Lincoln Cathedral C 5,4; in a Gurney MS, in the Cardigan MS of the Canterbury Tales ; and in a Huth MS, now No. 144 of the Huntington Library, California. Halliwell in his edition of the Minor Poems printed the Harley 116 text, reprinted in Neilson and Webster’s Chief British Poets, p. 209. The second Caxton was re- printed for the Roxburghe Club in 1818, and the first Caxton (unique) was facsimiled in 1906 by the Cambridge University Press. As the MS Longleat 258 is in private possession and difficult of access, I describe it in some detail. It is of 147 leaves 854 by 5% inches in size, mainly in eights, paper quires in vellum covers. It is written in one small legible cur- rent hand, evenly but not handsomely, three spaced stanzas to the page, without ornament. The titles of the poems are usually in colophons; a slovenly later hand has put in running titles. An inserted note by Henry Bradshaw discusses the loss of the fifth and sixth quires, with which went the whole of the Flower and Leaf and the first six stanzas of Chaucer’s Mars. A contemporary table of contents on the last verso shows that the volume also once contained, at the beginning, the Letter of Cupid and “Vnum Carmen”. This table is printed in Chaucer Soc. Odd Texts, p. 251, and also in ModLangNotes 20:77, where I de- scribed the MS. The contents are :— 1-32a, the Temple of Glass. Most of 32a was blank, and three stanzas were later written there, perhaps by Sir John Thynne, an early owner. These stanzas are printed, from MS B. M. Adds. 17942, by Fligel, Neuengl. Lesebuch 39. Fol. 32b is blank. See Schick’s ed. of the Temple of Glass, EETS 1891. (Two eights are missing) 49a-54b, Chaucer’s Mars, impf. at beginning. Printed Chaucer Soc. SPT, p. 141. 55a-57b, Chaucer’s Pity. Printed Chaucer Soc. Odd Texts, p. 251. 58a-75b, the Assembly of Ladies. This text not noted by Skeat, vii:380 ff. 76a-84a, Chaucer’s Anelida. Printed Chaucer Soc. SPT 37. Fol. 84b is blank. 85a-101a, Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules. Printed Chaucer Soc. SPT, p. 1. Fol. 101b is blank. 102a-119a, the Eye and the Heart. Printed Anglia 34:235-265. Most of 119a and all 119b are blank. 120a-136b, La Belle Dame sans Merci, by Ros. This text not noted by Skeat, vii: 299. See my Manual, pp. 432-33. 137a-147a, the Churl and the Bird. Text here printed. Fol. 145b and all of 146 are blank; the last stanza of the poem, on 147a, is written by the usual scribe, but the three stanzas on 145a, i.e., 46, 47, and 48, are in the later hand of the codex, while the last gathering of the MS has nine paper leaves instead of the usual six. Two stanzas, 49 and 50, are lacking to the poem, as also in the Balliol copy. It seems probable that the scribe had an imperfect copy before him, recognized it as such, and enlarged his final quire to permit addition later, putting his 104 JOHN LYDGATE last stanza after his estimated space to make it clear that more text was to come. Whatever copy the later scribe then found was short two stanzas, as is Balliol, Cf. p. 336 of my Manual for the procedure of the Fairfax and the Bodley MSS in the Book of the Duchesse under, similar conditions. Stanzas 49 and 50, missing from Longleat and from Balliol, are here sup- plied from MS Lincoln Cathedral C 5, 4. This MS, a damaged and somewhat mutilated volume of 86 paper leaves, contains but four entries, viz.: Lydgate’s St. Albon and St. Amphabell, impf. at beginning and at close; the Churl and Bird, lacking 8 stanzas at beginning; Lydgate’s St. Austin at Compton; and his Dance Macabre. These three latter poems appear in MS Lansdowne 699 in the same order and with the same headings; and the Dance Macabre text in both MSS is of the same recension, and closely similar. Could the codices be laid side by side, it might even appear that the writing was identical; so far as my visual memory served, the hands were not unlike. In the Longleat MS a hand other than the scribe’s has made some correc- tions; see lines 76, 225, 266, 280, 305, 306, in the footnotes. Special textual dif- ferences among the MSS are dealt with in the Notes; see lines 1, 51, 76, 115, 177, Zl0V227, 352, 300-7. Problemes of olde likenes and figures Whiche proued ben ful fructuous of sentence And han auctorite grounded on scriptures By resemblaunce of notable Apparence With moralite concluding on prudence 5 Like as the Bibyll rehersith by writyng Howe trees sumtyme chose heim self a king ffirst in thair chois they named the Olyve To reigne amonge heim Judicum doth ex- presse But he himself gan excusyn blyue 10 That he might not forsake his fatenesse Ner the ffigge tre his amerous swetnesse Ner the vyne his holsom fressh tarage Whiche yevith comfort vnto almaner age 3 And sembla(b)ly Poetes Laureate 15 By derke parables ful convenyent ffayn that birddes and bestes of estate As Roial Egles and lyons of assent Sent out writes to holde a perlament And made decrees brevely for to saye Summe to haue lordship and summe to obaye 2, 11. Only Longleat has ful, that. 4. Harl. and Kk have nobill inst. of notable. 17. Other MSS ffeyne, ffeynyn. 4 Egles in the eyre highest take hir flight Power of lyons on the grounde is sene Cedre amonge trees highest is of sight And the laurer of nature (is) ay grene 25 Of floures al flora goddes and quene Thus (of) al thinges there ben diver- sites Summe of estat and summe of low degres 5 Poites written wonderful liknesse And vnder couert kepe heim self ful cloos 30 They take bestes and foules to witnesse Of whois fe(y)nynges fables first aroos And here I cast vnto my purpose Oute of the frenssh a tale to translate Whiche in a paunflete I red and saw but late 35 6 This tale whiche I make of mencion In gros rehersith by writing thaire Thre proverbes paied for the raunson Of a faire brid that was take in a snare Wondre desirous to scape oute of hir care 40 Of myn auctorite folowing the processe So as it fil in ordre I shal expresse 22. Other MSS to take: note the infinitives of 20, 21 2a ih. Longleat omits is, of. 41. Other MSS auctor inst. of auctorite. THE CHURL AND THE BIRD 105 Whilom there was in a smal vilage As myn auctour maketh rehersayl A chorle whiche hade lust and gret corage 45 Within him self by deligent trauayl Taraye his gardyne with notable ap- perayl Of leng(t)h and brede elich square and longe Hegged and diched to make it sure and stronge Alle the aleys were made playne with sonde 50 The benches couerd with new turvys grene Swete herbes with condites at honde That welled vp ayenst the sonne shene Like siluer stremes as any cristal clene The burbly wawes (in ther) vp boyl- ling 55 Rounde as birall thair stremes out shew- ing 9 Amyd the gardyn stode a fressh laurere Thereon a birde synging day and nyght With sonnysh feders brighter then gold were Whiche with hir song made hevy hertes light 60 That to be holde it was an heuenly sight Howe towarde even and day dawynge She dud hir payne moost amorously to singe 10 Esperus enforced hir corage Towarde even whan Phebus gan to (w )est 65 Amonge the braunches to hir avauntage To singe hir complaynt and than to go to rest And at the rising of the quene Alcest To synge ayein as it was to hir dewe Erly on morowe the day sterre to sa- lewe 70 il It was a verrey hevenly melodye Evyn and morowe to here the briddes song 55. Other MSS have in ther before vp. Harl. has in. 62. Other MSS and in the dawnynge. 65. Longleat reads gan to rest. 67. Other MSS, except Hh, read complyn inst. of complaynt. And the swete sugred Armonye Of vncouth warbles and tewnes draw along That al the gardyn of the noys rong 75 (Tyl) on (a) morowe that Tytan shone ful clere The bride was trapped and taken in a pantere 12 The chorle was glad that he this bride had take Mery of chere of loke and of visage And in al hast he cast for to make 80 Within his hous a praty litel cage And with hir song to reioyse his corage Tyll at the last the cely bride abrayde And sobirly thus to the chorle she saiede 13 I am now take and stand vnder daun- gire 85 Holde straite that I may not flee A dewe my songe wt al my notes clere Nowe that I haue lost my liberte Now am I thral and summe tyme I was free And trust well while I stond in dis- tresse 90 ' I can not syng ner make noo gladnesse 14 And though my cage forged were of gold And the penacles of byral and cristal I remembre a proverbe said of olde Who lesith his fredome in faith he lesith al 95 ffor I had leuer vpon a branche smal Merely to singe amonge the wodes grene Thenne in a cage of siluer bright and shene 5 Songe and prison han noon accordaunce Trowest thou I wol synge in prisoun Songe procedith of Ioye and of pleas- aunce And prison causith deth and distruc- cioun Rynging of fetters make noo mery sou Howe shuld he be glad or Iocunde Ayeinst his wille that lithe in chaynes bounde 105 76. Longleat has been corrected; see Note. 90. while, Harl, Trin.; now, Linc, Lansd. Kk. 104. Other MSS read Or howe shuld, etc. 106 JOHN LYDGATE 16 What availith a lion to be kyng Of bestes al shet in a Tour of stoon Or an egle vnder streit kepyng Called also kyng of foules echoon ffye on lordship when liberte is goon 110 Answere hereto and lete it not asterte Who singith mery that singith not in herte 17 But if thou wilt rejoys of my singyng Lette me goo flee fre from al daunger And euery day in the mornyng II5 I wil repair vnto thy laurer And fresshely syng wt lusty notes cler Vndre thy chambre and afore thy halle Euery season whan thou list me calle 18 To be shitt vp and pynned vndre drede 120 Noo thing accordith vnto my nature Though I were fedde wt mylke & wastel brede And swete cruddes brought to my pasture Yet had I leuer to doo my besy cure Erly in the morowe to (shrape) in the vale 125 To fynde my dyner amonge the wormes smale 19 The labourer is gladder at the plough Erly on the morowe to fede him on bacoun Than som man is that hath tresour ynough And of al deyntes plente and foyson 130 And hath noo fredom with his posses- sion ‘To goo at large but as a bere at the stake ‘To passe his boundis but if he leve take 20 ‘Take this answere ful for conclusion ‘To synge in prison thou shalt me not constrayn I35 ‘Tyll I haue liberte in woddes vp and doon To fleen at large on bowghes rough & playn And of reason thou shuldest not disdayn 109, 112. Other MSS read euerichoon, of herte. 115. See Note. 125. sharpe has been emended to scrape; other { MSS. _shrape. 134. Trin, Harl. for ful; Linc, Lansd, Hh, for a full. Of my desires but laugh and haue good game But who is a chorle wold eche man were pe same 140 21 Welle quod the chorle / sith it wol not be That I desire / as by thyn talkynge Maugre thyn hede / thou shalt chese oon of thre Within a cage merely to synge Or to the kechyn I shal thy body brynge 145 Pul thy feders that ben so bright and clere And after rost the / or bake the to my dynere 22 Thenne quod the Bride to reason say not nay Toching my songe / a ful answere thou hast And when my feders pulled ben away 150 If I be rosted other bake in past Thou shalt haue of me a ful smal repast But if thou wilt werke be my counsaille Thou maist be me haue passing gret availle 23 If thou wilt vnto my rede assent 155 And suffre me goo / frely from prison Withoute raunsoun / or any other rent I shal the yeve / a notable gwerdoun Thre gret wisdomes according to reason More of value take hede what I prof- fre 160 Than al the gold / that shitt is in thy cofre 24 Trust me wel / I shal the not disceyue Welle quod the chorle telle on anoon lete se Nay quod the bride thou maist aforne conceyue Who that shal teche / of reason he must goo fre 165 It sitt a maistre / to haue his liberte And at large to teche his lessoun 147. Trin, Hh omit first the; Linc, Lansd, omit both. Harl reads—the rooste and baake, etc. 148. Longleat inserts I before say; Lansd and Calig insert IJ before nay. 152. Other MSS of me haue. 160. Other MSS I do profre. 164. Other MSS thou must afore, etc. THE CHURL AND THE BIRD 107 Haue me not suspecte I meane noo tresoun 25 Welle quod the chorle I holde me content I trust thy promyse / which thou hast made to me 170 The bride fligh forth the chorle was of assent And toke hi(r) flight vp to the laurer tre Then thought she thus / now that I stande fre With snares panters I cast not al my lyve Ner with noo lyme twigges any more to stryve 175 26 He is a foole that scaped is daungere Hath broken his (fetters) & fled is from prison That wol resort for brent childe dredith fere Eche man be ware of wisdome and rea- son Of Sugre strawed that hidith fals poi- son 180 There is noo more perlious venom of sharpnesse Than when it hath of treacle a likenesse 27 Who dredith noo perel in perell he shal falle Smothe waters ben ofte sithes depe The quayle pipe can moost falsly calle 185 Tylle the quayle vndre the net doth creepe A blere eyed fouler trust not though he wepe Eschewe his thombe of weping take noon hede That smale briddis can nype by the hede 28 And now that I suche daungier am as- kaped 190 I wol be ware and afore prouide That of noo fouler I wol no more be laped ffrom thaire lyme twigges I wol fle fer aside Where perel is / (gret) perel is to abide 172. Longleat his, altered by corrector. 177. Longleat feders; see Note. 194, 197, 202. Longleat omits gret, inserts thou, inserts second of. Come nere thou chorle take hede to my speche 195 Of thre wisdomes that I wol the teche 29 Yeue thou not of wisdome to haste cre- dence To euery tale ner to eche tything But considre of reason and prudence Amonge many tales / is many loude lesing 200 Hasty credence causith gret hinderyng Report of tales and tythinges brought vp of new Maketh many man to be holde vntrew 30 ffor oo party take this for my raunsoun Lerne the secunde grounded on scrip- ture 205 Desire thou not / by noo condicioun Thing that is impossible to recure Worldly desire stondith al in aventure And who desireth to clymbe to high on loft By souden turne he falleth oft vnsoft 31 The threde is this / be warre both evyn & morowe fforgete it not / but lerne this of me ffor tresour lost / make neuer to gret sorowe Whiche in noo wise / may recouerde be ffor who taketh sorow / for losse in that degre 215 Rekyn first his losse / and after rekyn his payne Of oo sorowe he maketh sorowes twayne 32 After this lessoun / the bride began a song Of hir eschape gretly reioysing 210 And she remembring also of the wrong Don by the chorle / first at hir taking Of hir affray / and of hir prisonyng Glad that she was at large and oute of drede Saide vnto him howyng aboue his hede 33 Thou were quod (she) a verrey natural foole_ . 225 200. Other MSS gret# inst. of loude. 201. Other MSS hath causid inst. of causith. 210, 227. See Notes. 221. Longleat reads Down by, etc. 225. The corrector of Longleat inserts she. 108 JOHN LYDGATE To suffre me depart / of thy lewdenesse Thou augtest of right complayne & to make dole And in thyn hert / haue gret heuynesse That thou hast lost so passing gret rychesse Whiche might haue sufficed by value of rekenyng 230 To pay the raunsoun of a mighty kyng 34 There is a stone whiche called is Iagounce Of olde engendred within myn entrayle Whiche of fyne gold peysith a gret vnce Citheryn of colour like garnettes of entayle 235 Whiche maketh men victorious in batayle And who so euer bere on him this stone Is fully assured ayeinst his mortal foone 35 Who hath this stone / in possessioun Shal suffre noo pouert / ner noon indi- gence 240 But of plente haue tresour and foysoun And euery man shal doo him reuerence And noon enemy shal doo him offence But fro thyn handes now that I am goon Playne if thou wilt (for) thy part is noon 245 36 It causith loue it maketh men gracious And fauourable in every man is sight It makith accorde betwix folke envyous Comfortith sorowful / and makith heuy hertes light Like Topasion of coloure sonnysh bright 250 I am a fole to telle alle at ones Or teche a chorle the prise cf precious stones 37, Men shulde not put a precious Marga- rete As Rubeis Sapheres / or other stones ynde Emeraudes ner rounde perles white 255 To forne rude swyne / that loue draff of kinde ffor a Sowe dili(ti)th as I fynde More in foule draff / hir pigges for to glade 245. Longleat omits for. 249. Harl, Hh, Calig, also have and; not in other texts. Then in al the perry / that cometh of garnade 38 Eche thing draweth to his semblable ffisshe in the see / bestes on the stronde The eyre for foules of nature is conven- able To a plough man for to till the lande And to a chorle a muke forke in his hande I lese my tyme any more to tary 265 To telle a boyuer of a lapidary 39 That thou haddest / thou getest nomore agayne Thy lyme twigges and panters I defye To lete me goo thou were foule ouer- sayne To lese thy richesse only of folye 270 I am now fre to sing / and for to flye Where that me list / and he is a fole at al That goth at large / and maketh him self thral 40 To here of wisdome thyn eres ben half defe Like an Asse that listith on an harpe 275 Thou maist goo pipe in an hyvye lefe Better is to me to sing / on thornes sharpe Than in a Cage with a Carle to carpe ffor it was saide of folkes yore agoon A Chorles (thralle) is alwey woo begoon 41 . The chorle felt his hert part on twayn ffor verrey sorowe / and a sondre ryve Alas quod he I may well wepe and playn As a wreche neuer like to thryve But forto endure in pouert al my lyve 285 ffor of foly / and of wilfulnesse I haue now loste al holy my richesse 42 I was a lord I crye oute on fortune Hade gret tresour late in my keping Whiche might haue made me long to (contune ) 290 259. Other MSS, except Lansd, have oute of garnade. 260. Harl, Linc, Lansd, Hh, wnto. 266. Lansd, Hh, Calig, read chorl inst. of boveer. and the corrector of Longleat has written chorl above boyuer. 280. The Lt. corrector writes thralle above chorle. Linc, Lansd, Harl, Trin, have cherl, wyfe. 290. Lt. writes contynue, other MSS contune. THE CHURL AND THE BIRD 109 With thilke stone to haue lyued like a kyng If that I hade sett it in a ryng Borne it vpon me I had hade good ynough I shulde no more haue goon ynto the plough 43 Whenne the Bride sawe the chorle thus morne 295 And how that he was heuy of his c(h)ere She toke hir flight / and gan ayein retorne Towarde him / and said as ye shal here O dulle Chorle wisdomes for to lere That I the taught al is left behinde 300 Raced awey / and clene oute of thy mynde 44 Taught I the not this wisdome in sen- tence To euery tale brought vp to the of newe Not to hastly to yeue therto credence Vnto tyme thou knew that (it) were trewe 305 Alle is not gold that (sheweth) goldissh hewe Ner stoones al by nature as I fynde Be not Saphers / that shewen colour ynde 45 In this doctryne I lost al my laboure To teche the suche prouerbes of sub- staunce 310 Now maist thou see thyn lewde blynde erroure ffor al my body peysed in balaunce Weyeth not an vnce rude is thy remem- braunce I to haue more peyce in myn entrayle Then al my body sett for countervayle 46 Alle my body wey(e)th not an vnce Howe might then I haue in me a stone That peyseth more than doith a gret Tagonce Thy brayne is dulle / thy witte is almost goone Of thre wisdomes thou hast forgoten oone 320 296. Lt reads clere inst. of chere. 305. The corrector inserts it. 306. The corrector writes sheweth over shyneth. 309. No other MS has al. 315. Other MSS countertayle. Thou shuldest not after my sentence To euery tale yeue hasty credence I bad also be warre (both) even and morowe ffor thing lost / of sodeyne aventure Thou shuldest neuer make to muche sorowe 325 When thou seist / thou maist not it recure Here thou failist / whiche doth thy besy cure In thy snare to cache me ayeine Thou art a fole thy labour is in vayne 48 In the threde thou doost also rave 330 I bad thou shuldest in noo manere wise Coueyt thing / whiche thou maist not haue In whiche thou hast forgote my enprise That I may sey plainly to deuise Thou hast of madenesse forgeten al thre 335 Notable wisdomes / that I taught the 49 It wer but foly / mor with the to carpe Or to preche / of wisdamys more or lasse I hold hym mad / that bryngeth forth his harpe Ther on to teche / a rude fordullid Asse 340 And mad is he / that syngeth a fool a masse And he most mad / that doth his besy- nesse To teche a cherl / termys of gentilesse 50 And semblably / in Aprill & in May When gentil briddis most make mello- dye 345 The cokkow syngen can but oo lay In othir tunys / she hath no, fantasye Thus euery thyng / as clerkis specefye ffrut on trees / & folk of euery age ffro whens thei cam / thei take a tarage 350 51 The Vynteneer tretith / of his holsom vynes 323. Longleat reads but, other MSS _ both. Stanzas 46, 47, 48, are in later hand; see introd. to this poem. Stanzas 49 and 50 are from the Lincoln Cathedral MS; see Introduction. 346. Harl and Trin read can than but, etc. 110 JOHN LYDGATE Off gentil frut / bostith eek the garden- eer The ffissher cast / his hookis & his lynes To cachche ffissh / in euery fressh ryveer Off tilthe of lond / tretith the boveer 355 The gentylman talkythe of genterye The cherl deliteth / to speke of ribaudye 52 All oon to the a facoun & a kite As good an owle / as a Popyngay A dongel doke / as deynte as a snyte 360 Who serueth a cherl / hath many a car- ful day Adieu sir cherl farweel I flye my way I cast me nevir / hen(s)forth my lyvyng Afforn a cherl / any mor to synge 53 Verba auctoris Ye folk that shal this fable seen & reede 365 Newe forgid talis / I counsell you to flee ffor los of good / takith nat to gret heede 352. Other MSS, except Linc and Hh, have not eek, 356-7. See Notes. Beeth nat to sorweful for noon aduersite Coueiteth nat thyng that may nat be And remembrith wher evir that ye gon 370 A cherlis thrale / is alway woo begon 54 Vnto purpos / this proverbe is ful riff Rad & reportid / bi old remembrance A childis bird / & a knavis wiff Haue ofte sith / gret sorwe & mys- chance 375 Who hath freedam / hath al suffisance Bett is freedam with litil in gladnesse Than to be thral in all wordly richesse 55 Lenvoye Goo litil quayeer & recomende me Vnto my maistir / with humble affec- cion 380 Beseche hym lowly / of mercy & pite Off thi rude makyng / to haue compas- sion And as touchyng / thi translacion Out of the frenssh / how euer the ynglissh be All thyng is seyd / vndir correccion 385 With supportacion of your benygnyte 366. Harl and Hh as here; Linc, Lansd, have concetleth inst. of I counsell. Explicit fabula de Aue & Rustico HORNS AWAY When Anne of Bohemia came to England in 1381 to marry Richard II, she brought with her, says Miss Strickland in her Queens of England, three fashions previously unfamiliar to Englishwomen. One was the use of pins, as we know them; another was the sidesaddle; the third was the high forked headdress or horned cap. “This cap,” continues Miss Strickland, “was at least two feet in height, and as many in width; its fabric was built of wire and pasteboard, like a very widespreading mitre, and over these horns was extended glittering tissue or gauze. Monstrous and outrageous were the horned caps that reared their heads in England directly the royal bride appeared in one.” It was an age of extravagance in dress, not only in the use of costly ma- terials, but in the cut and trimming of all garments. Richard II and his un- worthy favorites excited the anger and contempt of the people by the fanciful absurdity of their clothes. The anonymous play known as the Woodstock Play,! which praises “plain Thomas” duke of Gloucester, in contrast to the foolish prodigality of the king, has several scenes deriding the “wyld and antick habits” of the courtiers. Among the fashions held up to laughter are the high pointed * Printed in Jahrb. der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 35:3-121 (1899). HORNS AWAY 111 shoes, connected with the hose by chains, or as the play has it, “a kynd coherence twixt the tooe and knee”. There are also mentioned Italian cloaks and Spanish hats, their plumed tops “waving a cubit high above their wanton heads”. See the “hygh cappis wytlesse” and “long peked schone” mentioned in a ballad printed by Wright, Political Poems, ii:251; and cf. notes here on Barclay’s Ship of Fools, lines 456, 8479-85, where the English Acts of Apparel are cited. See also Hoc- cleve’s Regement of Princes, 421-546, and the description of the Lombard kings in the Fall of Princes, ix :838 ff. Women’s headgear was as extravagant as men’s. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath wore to church kerchiefs weighing ten pounds; Piers Plowman’s peasant is warned by Reason that he should not let his wife’s head cost half a mark.t When the horned headdress was succeeded by the steepleshaped, expenditure was in nowise decreased, for jewels and long silk veils were added. See the headdresses reproduced in Shaw’s Dresses and Decorations, ii, from MS Harley 6431, where Christine de Pisan presents a poem to Queen Isabella of France; and see ibid. from MS Royal 18 E ii (a Froissart MS) showing a masque before Charles VI of France; see also ibid., the portrait of Constance, wife of John of Gaunt, wearing the horned headdress. Fairholt in his Costume in England has many small outline cuts taken from manuscript; this poem is cited p. 148 of his 1860 edition. Horned headgear was also common, and derided, in France at an earlier date; see the Dit des Cornetes in Jubinal’s Jongleurs et Trouvéres, p. 87, re- produced by Fairholt in Satirical Songs, p. 29; see La Contenance des Femmes in Jubinal’s Nouveau Recueil, pp. 174-5; see the Roman de la Rose 13500-03, ed. Méon, i1:338. The fashion persisted long in England; see Elmham’s Liber Metricus, where the author remarks of the crowds assembled to see Henry V pass,— Quaeque fenestra nitet Vultibus ornatis, utinam sine cornubus! illic Erexit cornu nobis Deus ipse salutis: Hine confringantur cornua fulta malis. Lydgate mentions the horned caps several times; in Reason and Sens 6565 he says that good women “‘dedely haten highe crestys And to be hornyd lych as bestys.” In the Fall of Princes, ii:4231-2, he implies the same thing; in the golden world (tbid. iii:3158) “Women that age farsid were nor hornyd”; and again, vii:1206, “Of hornyd beestis no boost was then Iblowe.” This “high style’ changed in Henry VII’s time to a low flat cap, with the same suddenness and completeness as did the style of hair, of sleeves, and of shoes. Manuscripts of the poem are:—Bodl. Laud 683, printed Relig. Antiq. i:79, pr. by Halliwell, p. 46, by Fairholt in his Satirical Songs, 1849, p. 51—Univ. Libr. Cambridge Hh iv, 12, printed EETS PolitReligLovePoems, 1903, p. 45, collated with Harley 2255; this text is repr. by Neilson and Webster, Chief British Poets, p. 222, from the earlier EETS ed. of 1893.—Harley 2255, printed in Nicolas’ Chronicle of London, 1827, p. 270, and here.—Jesus Coll. Cambr. 56.— Bodl. Rawl. C 86.—Trin.Coll.Cambr R 3, 19.—Bodl. Ashmole 59 is a corrupt and careless text.—Harley 2251 and Adds. 34360, sister texts, are of four stanzas eee cea inclusion of Leyden Vossianus 9 in the list I do not find justified. *B-text, passus v, line 31. 112 JOHN LYDGATE [MS Brit. Mus. Harley 2255, fol. 6] Off god and kynde / procedith al bewte Crafft may shewe / a foreyn apparence But nature ay must haue be souereynte Thyng countirfet / hath noon existence Twen gold and gossomer is gret differ- ence 5 Trewe metal / requerith noon allay Vnto purpoos / by cleer experyence Bewte wyl shewe / thouh hornes wer away Riche attires / of gold and perre Charbonclis rubies / of moost excel- lence 10 Shewe in dirknesse / liht wher so they be By ther natural / heuenly influence Doubletys of glas / yeve a gret evidence Thyng countirfet / wil faylen at assay On this mateer / concludyng in sen- tence 5 Bewte wyl shewe / thouh hornys wer away 3 Aleyn remembryth / his compleynt who lyst see In his book / of famous eloquence Clad al in floures / and blosmys of a tree He sawh nature / in hir moost excel- lence 20 Vpon hir hed a keuerchef of Valence Noon othir richesse / of countirfet array Texemplefye / by kyndly providence Bewte wil shewe / thouh hornys wer away 4 ffamous poetys of antiquyte 25 In Grece and Troye renoumyd of pru- dence Wroot of queen Heleyne / and Penelope Off Polyceene / with hir chaast Inno- cence ffor wyves trewe / calle Lucrece to pre- sence That they wer fayr / ther can no man sey nay 30 Kynde wrouht hem / with so gret dilli- gence On the MS see p. 79 ante note. This poem is a tour de force on three rimes; for Lydgate’s most extensive case of this “‘rhetorical color’ see Rome Remember, p. 169 below. Ther bewte couthe / hornys wer cast away 5 Clerkys recorde / by gret auctorite Hornys wer yove / to beestys for dif- fence A thyng contrary / to ffemynyte 35 To be maad sturdy / of resistence But arche wyves egre in ther violence ffers as Tygre for to make affray They haue despyt / and ageyn con- science Lyst nat of pryde / ther hornys cast away 40 6 Lenvoye Noble pryncessys / this litel shoort ditee Rewdly compiled / lat it be noon offence To your womanly / merciful pitee Thouh it be rad / in your audience Peysed ech thyng / in your iust aduer- tence 45 So it be no displeasaunce to your pay Vndir support / of your pacience Yeuyth example hornys to cast away 7 Grettest of vertues / is humylite As Salomon seith / sone of Sapience Moost was acceptyd / to the deite Takith heed heer of / yevyth to this woord credence How Maria / which hadde a premynence Above alle women / in bedleem whan she lay At cristes birthe / no cloth of gret dis- pence 35 She weryd a keverche / hornys wer cast away 8 Off birthe she was hihest of degre To whom alle aungelis / did obedience Of Dauidis lyne / which sprang out of iesse In whom alle vertues / by iust conven- ience 60 Maad stable in god / by goostly confi- dence This roose of Jerycho / ther greuh noon suych in May Poor in spirit / parfight in pacience In whoom alle hornys of pryde were put away BYCORNE AND CHICHEVACHE 113 9 Mooder of Ihesu / myrour of chastite 65 In woord nor thouht / that nevir did offence Trewe examplaire / of Virginitie Heedspryng and welle / of parfit conty- nence Was nevir clerk / by rethoryk nor science Kowde all hir vertues / reherse to this day 70 Noble Pryncessys / of meeke benyuo- lence Bexample of hir / your horns cast away Explicit BYCORNE AND CHICHEVACHE The immediate original of this poem, although not yet identified, was in all probability French. Texts of French poems on Bigorne and on Chicheface are printed by Montaiglon in his Recueil as below, ii:187 and xi:277; both are in nine-line stanzas, alternate speeches by beast and by victim. Neither of these texts is earlier than the mid-sixteenth century, nor are the closely similar French versions printed by Bolte in Archiv 114:80 ff. But Chicheface, the “beste maigre” who devours the meek-spirited, is alluded to in the French fifteenth-century Mys- tere de Ste. Genevieve, as if well-known; see Jubinal’s edition as below, i:248. In a note ibid. i:390 Jubinal prints a poem of 68 lines, in couplets, on “Chinche- fache,’ from a French manuscript of the fourteenth century; and Chaucer, in the envoy to his Clerk’s Tale, warns wives against patience, “Lest Chichevache yow swolwe in hir entraille.’” It was thus a current allusion before the fifteenth century, The two names were originally Bigorne and Chi(n)chefache; and their coupling and contrast is a late medieval arrangement. The former word has not yet been explained etymologically, and is rare. Chicheface or Chinchefache is much the commoner of the two; the compound means “niggard-face”, and chinche or chynchy appears in Middle English as well as in French to mean “stingy, tight”; see, e.g., Hoccleve’s Male Regle, line 136. The French term is used to signify something like “scarecrow” in Martin Le Franc’s Champion de Dames (ca. 1440), where the Adversary declares that woman, “celle Ciche- face’, was made out of the leavings after man had been carefully created, just as a potter fashions a queer “marmouset” out of his clay remnants when the pot has been finished. A little earlier, in Baudet Herenc’s Doctrinal de la séconde rhétorique of 1432, the “sotte amoureuse” is indignantly termed by the versifier “le laide cicheface”; and in the fourteenth-century Lamentations de Mathéolus, iii :3220 ff., the poet says he is “comme une chicheface, Maigre par dessoubs ma peaucelle.” These are all general terms. But in the fourteenth-century lines De la Chinchefache printed by Jubinal (as below), there is described a lean horrible monster, long-toothed and staring-eyed, whose function is to seize and devour such women as do not “talk back” to their lords. And in the Ste. Genevieve drama above mentioned, the angry bourgeois says to the saint, who is counselling patience, “Gardez vous de la chicheface ; el vous mordra s’el vous encontre.”” Both these texts write the name with an f, and the former says nothing of any re- semblance between the monster and a cow; nor do most of the sixteenth-century pictures so represent Chichevache. That at the Chateau de Villeneuve has the body and head of a wolf, with horse’s hoofs behind and claws in front; in her huge jaws she holds a struggling woman in bourgeois dress. Other cuts show 114 JOHN LYDGATE the creature horned, however, and Lydgate (see stanza 12) is explicit. Doubt- less as soon as the medial f was voiced enough to sound like vache, the legend responded. For Bycorne or Bigorne there is much less to be said. Perhaps the change of g to c, giving the word the apparent meaning of “two-horned”, followed the transmutation of Chichevache into a cow and the connection of the two beasts. There is a cow Bicorne in Nigel Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum, a twelfth- century Anglo-Latin satire; but she merely cuts off her tail in despair when it is frozen into the ice, and has no function as a peripatetic censor. Lydgate men- tions “Bycornys” in Troy Book ii:7702, with other woodland beings. The true French word bigorne meant either an iron-shod staff, or “argot”, according to Godefroy; the transference to signify a beast of folk-lore is not yet explained. At the Chateau de Villeneuve the creature is represented as shortlegged, scaly- backed, and with a human head, in the huge jaws of which a man has disappeared all but the arms. The use of verses to accompany tapestry or wall-paintings is an aspect of medieval art and letters not yet fully investigated. See Male’s L’art réligieux de la fin du moyen-age en France, Paris, 1908; see Jubinal, refs. of 1838 and 1840 in list below; see a few notes by me in Englische Studien 43 :10-26, prefacing prints of two tapestry-poems by Lydgate. See the text of “Dames illustres qui ont esté Roynes”, stanzas written to accompany tapestries of eighteen queens, presented to Catherine de Médicis by their author, and at her bidding copied for Elizabeth of England. The transcript made for Elizabeth exists in Brit. Mus. Royal 20 A xx; see the 1921 catalogue of the Royal MSS. To some of its stanzas are prefixed directions for representing the figures; cf. Lydgate’s pro- cedure here. Stanzas painted, with their pictures, in the cloister of SS. Inno- cents at Paris served as Lydgate’s original for the Dance Macabre; and he may have obtained the French of this poem in a similar way. There are some verbal resemblances between his lines and the surviving French poems on Bigorne and on Chinchefache; but structurally the English is quite different. In Lydgate the two monsters are represented, in the same poem, as husband and wife, and the text is arranged to suit a series of pictures. The patient wife, and also the ungovernable wife, were stock subjects of medieval bourgeois narrative. Chaucer handled the former traditional theme, pitched in aristocratic key, in his Clerk’s Tale of Griselda; but in the Clerk’s envoy, so liberally used by Lydgate here, he adopted the bourgeois key. His Constance story, assigned to the Man