an attack on the unfortunate king even more bitter than the English Richard the Redeles ascribed to Langland.

The Confessio Amantis, by which Gower takes his place in English literature, contains a prologue, seven books on the seven deadly sins, and one on the duties of a king. As had already been shown in the Handlyng Synne, such a book need by no means be dull; and although Gower's poem has not that close touch with the daily life of its time which gives interest to its predecessor, it contains excellent reading. The sins are illustrated by stories, mostly from Ovid, but also from Statius, Josephus, Vincent de Beauvais, the Gesta Romanorum, and other sources. The duties of a king are laid down mainly from a celebrated medieval treatise, the Secreta Secretorum, supposed to have been written by Aristotle for the guidance of Alexander the Great. The octosyllabic couplets in which the poem is written are handled with freedom, and both rhymes and rhythm are regular and good. If accepted dates are right, Gower must have been nearly sixty when he wrote the Confessio Amantis, and it has the easy, pleasant garrulity which is sometimes found in old men's verse. This is how it began in its first form, written, it is thought, between 1383 and 1386. Mr Macaulay's new text not having appeared at the time of writing, our quotation is taken from the late Professor Morley's edited text in his Carisbrooke Library (1889), an excellent example of a popular edition:

Of hem that writen us to-fore
The bokės dwelle, and we therfore
Ben taught of what was written tho;
Forthy good is, that we also

In ourè time amonge us here

Do write of newė some matere

Ensampled of the olde wise,

So that it might in suche a wise,
Whan we be dede and elles where,
Belevé to the worldės ere,
In timé comend after this.
But for men sain, and sothe it is,
That who that al of wisdom writ
It dulleth ofte a mannės wit
To hem that shall it allday rede;
For thilke cause, if that ye rede,

I woldé go the middel wey

wrote

then Therefore

Remain coming

writeth

them

pleasure

And write a boke betwene the twey,
Somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore,
That, of the lasse or of the more, either of poor or rich.
Som man may like of that I write.
And for that fewè men endite

In our Englisshe, I thenkė make
A bokė for King Richardes sake,
To whom belongeth my legeaunce
With all min hertes obeisaunce
In all that ever a legė man

Unto his king may don or can,

That his coroné longé stonde.

I thenke and have it understonde As it befell upon a tide,

As thing which shuldė tho betide,
Under the town of newė Troye,
Which toke of Brute his firstė joye,
In Themse, whan it was flowend
As I by bote came rowend,
So as Fortune her time sette,
My legé lord perchaunce I mette,
And so befell as I came nigh
Out of my bote, whan he me sigh,
He bad me come into his barge,
And whan I was with him at large,
Amongės other thingės said
He hath this charge upon me laid
And bad me do my besinesse
That to his highe worthynesse
Some newė thing I shuldė boke
That he himself it mightė loke
After the forme of my writing.

flowing

saw

put into book form

When Gower had transferred his service to Henry of Lancaster, he changed all the latter part of this, and wrote:

I thenkė make
A boké for Englondė sake,

The yere sixtenthe of King Richard;
What shall befalle here-afterward,
God wote, for nowe upon this side
Men seen the worlde on every side
In sondry wise so diversed

That it wel nigh stant all reversed.

Richard had been no ill patron of poetry, and the unanimity with which Chaucer, Gower, and Langland (if he wrote Richard the Redeles) all welcomed the change of dynasty, though it may really represent the trend of popular opinion, proves also that, if poets do well not to put their trust in princes, princes on their side have small reason to trust poets.

In 1377, when starting for his second visit to Italy, Chaucer had appointed Gower one of his agents to look after his affairs during his absence; in 1382 or 1383 he sportively dedicated his Troilus to the 'moral' Gower and the 'philosophical' Strode, the 'moral' Gower having probably just completed his Vox Clamantis. Five or six years later, in the talk on the road which precedes the 'Tale of Constance,' as it takes its place in the Canterbury series as the 'Man of Lawes Tale,' Chaucer goes out of his way to express his horror of the story of Canacee which Gower had taken from Ovid and included in the Confessio Amantis. There can be no doubt that the attack was dictated by personal feeling against Gower, and the cause may perhaps have been that the latter had included in the Confessio not only an epitome of the Troilus story, but also the very tale of Constance which the Man of Law was about to tell. We need not concern ourselves with this poets' quarrel, but the comparison between the two versions of Constance's story is not uninteresting. Here is

Gower's rendering of the scene on the seashore of which Chaucer's version has already been given on page 68:

There was wepinge and there was wo,

But finally the thinge is do.

Upon the see they have her brought,

But she the cause wisté nought.

And thus upon the flood they wone

This lady with her yongé sone.
And than her hondes to the heven
She straught, and with a mildė steven
Knelend upon her bare kne
She saide: 'O highė magestee
Which seest the point of every trouth,
Take of thy wofull woman routh
And of this childe that I shal kepe.'
And with that word she gan to wepe
Swounend as dede, and there she lay,
But he, whiche alle thingės may,
Comforteth her, and atté laste
She loketh and her eyen caste
Upon her childe, and saydė this:
'Of me no maner charge it is
What sorwe I suffre, but of thee
Methenketh it is great pitee,
For if I stervẻ thou shalt die,
So mote I nedės by that weie,
For moderhed and for tendernesse,
With al min hotė besinesse,
Ordeignė me for thilke office,
As she that shal be thy norice.'
Thus was she strengthed for to stonde,
And tho she toke her childe in honde
And gaf it souke and ever amonge
She wepte and otherwhile songe
To rocké with her childe aslepe.

voice

Gower was not happy when he made Constance tell her babe that she would

With al min hotė besinesse
Ordeigne me for thilke office,

and there is no line in his version of the exquisite simplicity of Chaucer's 'Pees, litel sone, I wol do thee noon harm,' but it would be hypercritical to deny Gower very considerable merit as a storyteller; and as we find him turning from one tale to another and putting each of them into straightforward verse, not without some adjustment of tone to subject, it becomes possible for us to understand how for two centuries and more his name was always linked with Chaucer's, as only a little his inferior. In reality the difference was immense, but it was hardly greater than that which separates Gower's pleasant and readable verse from the pretentious prolixities of the next century.

Chaucer's Successors.

That Chaucer's delightful spring-tide should have been immediately succeeded, as far as what we may call literary poetry is concerned, by sheer November fog seems at first sight one of the strangest of accidents. In other departments of literature during the fifteenth century good work was being

done. Prose, if it did not advance rapidly, was yet in quite a healthy condition. There was a respectable undergrowth of unpretentious religious verse; the English ballads came into existence; and in the miracle-plays and moralities, along with much very poor stuff, vivid and forcible writing can easily be found. But for a century and a half after Chaucer's death the literary or Court poetry at its best gives but little pleasure, at its average is tedious, and at its worst represents the lowest depth to which English poetry has ever fallen.

To attribute this long interregnum to an accident by which for more than a century no Englishman was born with an aptitude for poetry is against the law of average; nor is it really difficult to find an explanation of the collapse. During the whole of the century every circumstance was unfavourable to literature. The continual wars told on the rich and educated classes even more heavily than on the commons, and the absolute cessation of the English school of illumination and calligraphy, which had reached such perfection at the end of the fourteenth century, proves how few wealthy patrons of literature were left in England during the Wars of the Roses. Closely connected with this is the depressing environment in which any literary poet must have found himself. After Agincourt there is nothing to be proud of in English history for the rest of the century, and the poverty of the country was probably a bar to literary intercourse with the Continent. When Chaucer began to write, English poetry was in great need of fresh inspiration, and through him she obtained it first from France, and then, to a far more important extent, from Italy. Among Chaucer's successors Stephen Hawes availed himself of French help to the extent of going back to that very dried-up fountain, the Roman de la Rose; but no one turned to Italy at all; and as far as kinship of spirit is concerned, not Lydgate, Hoccleve, or Hawes should be reckoned as Chaucer's real followers, but Surrey and Wyatt, who, by the help of Italian models, restored to English poetry the secrets of rhythm which he had found and his immediate successors had lost. Why they had lost them brings us our last point, the fact, namely, that, while language is always in a state of transition, the condition of the English language was peculiarly transitional in the fifteenth century. Chaucer himself, with a poet's instinct, had probably been slightly archaic in matters of pronunciation and grammatical inflection. The music of his verse depends entirely on its full force being given to every syllable, and on the due pronunciation of the final e as an integral part of many words and as an inflection. During the fifteenth century the final e was largely disused, and the struggles of poets who took Chaucer as their model under these changed conditions are truly pitiable. the one hand, his mobile decasyllabics parodied by lifeless lines which require absolute

to

On

are

monotony of voice for their scansion, and are made worse by their authors' fondness for long words; on the other, it seems possible that through the dropping of the final e many later writers misread the decasyllabics altogether, and regarded Chaucer's heroic couplets as only a new variety of the old octosyllables, to be read with four beats and a hasty slurring of any inconvenient syllables. Both these errors were destructive to poetry, and from the causes we have suggested the centre of poetic interest after Chaucer's death is transferred to Scotland (see page 166), where his example was as inspiring as that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had been to him.

We pass now to the first successors of Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, of whom, though the birth-date of neither is known with certainty, Hoccleve was probably a year or two the elder. In a poem written presumably in 1421 or 1422 he says of himself, 'Of age am I fifty winter and three,' and he must therefore have been born in 1368 or 1369 -that is, about the time when Chaucer was writing his Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse. He was probably born in London, and remained there till his old age, living in Chester's Inn. Originally intended for the priesthood, when he was nineteen or twenty he entered the Privy Seal Office as a

until some such provision could be made for him; and in 1409 this had been increased to £13, 6s. 8d. His earnings over and above this annuity, according to his own account, were no more than £4 a year, so that lack of pence pursued him all his life, and he may have sadly envied the comparative

clerk (c. 1387), and, as no ecclesiastical preferment was offered him, stayed there all his working life --some five-and-thirty years-till in 1424, by way of a retiring allowance, he was quartered on the Priory of Southwick, Hants. In November 1399 Henry IV., within six weeks of his accession (his even speedier benevolence to Chaucer will be remembered), had granted Hoccleve an annuity of £10

1 The following is a transcript of the stanza of text shown in the facsimile:

Hye noble and my3tty Prince excellent
My lord the Prince. o. my lord gracious
I humble seruant and obedient

wealth with which a discriminating age rewarded
Chaucer. But, as he justly remarks himself,
He that but little hath may do excess
In his degree, as well as may the rich;

and in his youth Hoccleve was a spendthrift, and in middle age, when he had given up hopes of a benefice, took 'more tow on his distaff' (his own

Vnto 3our estate hye and glorious
Of whyche I am ful tendre and ful gelous
Me recommaunde vnto 3our worthynesse
Wyth herte enter and spirit of meeknesse.

phrase) by marrying a wife. When he writes of his follies and troubles Hoccleve becomes interesting. He was a weak creature, who tried to win popularity by spending more than he could afford, sinned and repented with much facility, and was always complaining. But he shows us himself just as he was, and writes in these passages with more ease and simplicity than on any other subject. His longest poem is the Regement of Princes, dedicated to Henry V., when Prince of Wales, in 1412, our illustration from Arundel MS. 38 in the British Museum, the Prince's own copy, representing the poet on his knees before his patron. The Regement of Princes is a patchwork from the De Regimine Principum of Ægidius Romanus (c. 1280), the Secreta Secretorum, the moral treatise of Jacobus de Cessolis afterwards printed by Caxton 'The Game and Pley of the Chesse,' and other works. It is written in Chaucer's seven-line stanza, abounds in long words, and, save for its prologue, is tedious and dull. Another poem of some length, the story of 'Jereslaus' Wife,' from the Gesta Romanorum, is cast on the same lines as the 'Tale of Constance' used by Chaucer and Gower, and is readable, though poorly told. But all Hoccleve's best work is contained in the autobiographical prologue to the Regement; his Male Regle de T. Hoccleve, in which he recites his youthful follies; his Dialogue with a Friend; and some few others of his minor poems, not all of which have yet been printed.

as

Here, from the Male Regle, are some of his reminiscences (ll. 177-208):

Wher was a gretter maister eek than I,
Or bet acqweyntid at Westmynstre yate
Among the tavernéres namely,
And cookes whan I cam, eerly or late?
I pynchid nat at hem in myn acate,
But payed hem as that they axe wolde;
Wherefore I was the welcomer algate,
And for 'a verray gentilman' y-holde.
And if it happid on the someres day
That I thus at the taverne haddė be,
Whan I departé sholde and go my way
Hoom to the Privee Seel, so wowed me
Hete and unlust and superfluitee
To walke unto the brigge and take a boot,
That nat durste I contrárie hem all three,
But dide as that they stiréd me, God woot.
And in the wyntir, for the way was deep,
Unto the brigge I dressid me also,

The Prologue to the Regement of Princes, with its talk of Chaucer, the follies of fashionable clothing, and the treatment of old soldiers, is interesting throughout, but we can only quote from it Họccleve's complaint of the irksomeness of his work as a clerk:

With plow can I nat medlen, ne with harwe,

Ne wot nat what lond good is for what corne;
And for to lade a cart or fille a barwe,-

To which I never used was to-forne,-
My bak unbuxum hath swich thyng forsworne,
At instance of Writyng, his werreyour
That Stooping hath hym spilt with his labour.

Many men, fadir, wenen that writýnge

stubborn foeman hurt

No travaile is; thei hold it but a game:
Art hath no foe but swich folk unconnynge:
But whoso list disport hym in that same,
Let him continue, and he schal fynd it grame;
It is well gretter labour than it seemeth;
The blinde man of coloures al wrong deemeth.
A writer mot thre thynges to hym knytte,

And in tho may be no disseverance;
Mynde, eye and hand, non may fro othir flitte
But in hem mot be joynt continuance.
The mynde all hoole, withouten variance,
On the eye and hand awaytė moot alway,
And thei two eek on hym: it is no nay.

Whoso schal wrytė, may nat holde a tale

harm

whole

talk

With hym and hym, ne synge this ne that; this man and that But all his wittės hoolė, grete and smale,

specially

1, 2

Ther must appere, and halden hem ther-at;
And syn he spekė may, ne synge nat,
But bothe two he nedės moot forbere,
Hir labour to hym is the alengere.

always

wooed distaste

boat

Thise artificers se I day by day,

more troublesome

1 Ignorant. The line translates the Latin proverb, Ars non habet inimicum nisi ignorantem.

The whole passage is good, and the last couplet

Office he appears almost to have given up writing, but 'a Balade to my gracious Lord of Yorke' (the father of Edward IV.) shows that he must have lived till 1450 or thereabout, and still occasionally cudgelled out poetry. It need only be added that Hoccleve was a very orthodox person, argued with Sir John Oldcastle about his heresies in a poem of five hundred and twelve lines, and thoroughly approved of the burning of John Badby in 1410. His Regement of Princes and a volume of his minor poems have been edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr F. J. Furnivall, from whose introductions the foregoing notice of him has been largely drawn.

In his 'London Lyckpenny,' John Lydgate showed that he could, when he used his eyes and ears, invest his verse with the same interest which attaches to Hoccleve's reminiscences. Unfortunately this short poem is the only thing of the kind which has come down to us among the hundred and fifty thousand lines, more or less, which he poured out during his long life. Born in 1370 or a little after, at Lydgate, near Newmarket, John entered his noviciate at the great Benedictine abbey at Bury St Edmund's before he was fifteen, became a sub-deacon in 1389, deacon in 1393, and priest in 1397. In 1423 he was elected Prior of Hatfield Regis, but in 1434 went back to Bury for his health's sake. In his old age he received, in conjunction with a certain John Baret, a small pension, his share coming to £3, 16s. 8d., and he lived apparently to within a year or two of 1450. He may have studied in his youth at Oxford, and in 1421 he was at Paris, on what business we know not, but over and above his religious duties as a monk, his sole occupation in life was to turn out verses, and this he did with painful abundance.

Adopting the chronology of Dr Schick, the editor of his Temple of Glass for the Early English Text Society (1891), we find that before he was thirty Lydgate versified some of the fables of Æsop, and wrote two poems, the Chorl and Bird, and Horse, Goose, and Sheep, which subsequently enjoyed the honour of being printed and reprinted by Caxton. During the next dozen years (1400-1411) he is credited with having written the Flour of Curtesie, Black Knight, Temple of Glass, Assembly of Gods, Court of Sapience, Reason and Sensuality, and a Lyf of Our Lady. From 1412 onwards his work increases enormously in volume, and deteriorates in quality. The Troy-Book (30,000 lines) is thought to have occupied him till 1420, and to have been immediately succeeded by the Storie of Thebes (4716 lines). The Pilgrimage de Mounde, translated from the French of De Guilleville (12,000 lines), was his next large work; and in 1430 he began the Falls of Princes, a prolix rendering from Boccaccio's De Casibus Illustrium Virorum, which runs to over thirty-six thousand lines, or about twice as many as all the verse in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. At intervals amid these com

positions Lydgate wrote on Guy of Warwick, on the Dance of Death, on St Margaret, St Edmund (with unusual success), and St Alban. In 1445 he composed verses for Queen Margaret's entry into London, and about this time wrote his poetical Testament and engaged in a rendering of the Secreta Secretorum, which was finished after his death by Bennet Burgh, the last line of Lydgate's section being the curiously apposite, 'Death all consumeth, which may nat be denied.'

Lydgate's admiration for Chaucer was as hearty as Hoccleve's. His Complaint of the Black Knight is an imitation of Chaucer's Dethe of Blaunche, and his Story of Thebes was written as an additional Canterbury Tale, which he supposes himself to have told on the way home at Harry Bailey's request. He wrote in all of Chaucer's three chief metres; in the octosyllabic couplet with some fluency; in seven-line decasyllabics, woodenly enough, but not so badly as to be past hope of scansion; in the decasyllabic couplet, even if allowance be made for the defects of the sixteenthcentury texts, with an absolute failure to grasp the elementary principles of its music. Save as specimens of language all these poems are dead, and it is waste of space to speak of them; but here, in contrast to them, is Lydgate's one bit of real life, poetry only of a very low order, but with vigour and swing in it, and still full of interest. The poet has come to Westminster to seek justice, but finds that without money in his purse he can do nothing, and so he goes from place to place and fares no better, till he takes his way back again to the country: