No More Learning

Such questions as whether the Canterbury pilgrimage took place
in the actual April of 1385, or in any month of the poetical year,
or whether it is safe to date The House of Fame from the fact
that, in 1383, the 10th of December fell on a Thursday, the day
and month being given by the text and the day of the week being
that of Jove, whose bird carries the poet off-cannot be discussed
here. Even were the limits of space wider, the discussion might
be haunted by memories of certain passages in The Nun's Priest's
Tale and elsewhere. But some general points may be handled.
One such point of some importance is the probable extent
and nature of Chaucer's literary instruction and equipment. He
makes, not exactly a parade in the bad sense, but a very pardon-
able display of knowledge of that Latin literature which was the
staple of the medieval library; and, of course, he illustrates the


## p. 188 (#206) ############################################

188
Chaucer
promiscuous estimate of authorities and values which is charac-
teristic of his time. But the range of his knowledge, from the
actual classics (especially Ovid) downwards, was fairly wide, and
his use of it is generally apposite. In French, at least the French
of his own day, there can be no doubt that he was proficient, not
only as being grant translateur, but as taking subjects and forms
freely from what was still the leading literary vernacular of Europe
generally, though it had now been surpassed by Italy, so far as
individual accomplishment went. Nor, though the evidence is
less positive, can there be any reasonable doubt that he was
acquainted with Italian itself. A man of Chaucer's genius could,
no doubt, pick up a great deal of knowledge of Italian literature
even without, and much more with, the assistance of his Italian
visits. His mere reference to the 'laureat clerk Petrarch,' or to
Dante, “the great poet of Italy,' would not prove very much
as to the exact extent and nature of his acquaintance with
them. But the substance of Troilus, and of The Knight's
and Clerk': Tales, and of The House of Fame, proves every-
thing that can be reasonably required. It may be rash, espe-
cially considering how very uncertain we are of the actual
chronology of his works, to delimit periods of French and periods
of Italian influence too rigidly. But that these influences
themselves exist in Chaucer, and were constantly exerted on
him, there is no doubt at all. Much less attention has been
paid to his acquaintance with existing English literature; and
doubt has even been cast as to his possession of any. This is
ultra-sceptical, if it be the result of any real examination of the
evidence; but it is, probably, in most cases, based on a neglect or
a refusal to consider that evidence itself. That Chaucer had no
scholastic instruction in English (such as, no doubt, he had in
French and, possibly, in Italian) we know, indeed, for certain, or
almost for certain, inasmuch as his contemporary, Trevisa, informs
us that English was not used in schools, even for the purpose of
construing, till later. And it is, of course, certain that he makes
little direct mention of English writers, if any. He knew the
romances, and he makes them the subject of satiric parody in
Sir Thopas ; he knew (a point of some importance) the two
modes of alliteration and rime, and refers to them by the mouth
of one of his characters, the parson, in a fashion capital for literary
history. But there is little else of direct reference. A moment's
thought, however, will show that it would have been very odd
if there had been. Although Chaucer's is very far from being
a


## p. 189 (#207) ############################################

His Learning
189
mere court-poetry it was, undoubtedly, composed with a view to
court-readers; and these, as the passage in Trevisa shows,
were only just becoming accustomed to the treatment of English
as a literary language. There were no well-known named authors
for him to quote; and, if there had been, he could have gained
none of the little nimbus of reputation for learning which was so
innocently dear to a medieval writer, by quoting them. That, on
the other hand, he was thoroughly acquainted, if only by word
of mouth, not reading, with a great bulk of precedent verse and,
probably, some prose, can be shown by evidence much stronger
than chapter-and-verse of the categorical kind. For those who
take him-as he has been too seldom taken in the natural
evolution of English poetry and English literature, there is
not the slightest need to regard him as a lusus naturae who
developed the practice of English by the study of French, who
naturalised by touch of wand foreign metres and foreign diction
into his native tongue, and who evolved 'gold dewdrops of
English 'speech' and more golden bell-music of English rhythm
from Latin and Italian and French sources. On the contrary,
unprejudiced study will show that, with what amount of actual
book-knowledge it is impossible to say, Chaucer had caught up
the sum of a process which had been going on for some two
centuries at least and, adding to it from his own stores, as all great
poets do, and taking, as many of them have done, what help he
could get from foreigners, was turning cut the finished product
not as a new thing but as a perfected old one. Even the author
of Sir Thopas could not have written that excellent parody if he
had not been to the manner born and bred of those who produced
such things (and better things) seriously. And it is an idle multi-
plication of miracles to suppose that the verse—the individual
verses, not the batched arrangements of them—which directly
represents, and is directly connected with, the slowly developing
prosody of everything from Orm and Layamon to Hampole and
Cursor Mundi, is a sudden apparition—that this verse, both
English and accomplished, is fatherless, except for French,
motherless, except for Middle and Lower Latin, and arrived at
without conscious or even unconscious knowledge of these its
natural precursors and progenitors.
Of the matter, as well as of the languages, forms and sources
of his knowledge, a little more should, perhaps, be said. It
has been by turns exalted and decried, and the manner of its
exhibition has not always been wisely considered. It has been


## p. 190 (#208) ############################################

190
Chaucer
observed above, and the point is important enough for emphasis,
that we must not look in Chaucer for anything but the indis-
criminateness and, from a strictly scholarly point of view, the
inaccuracy, which were bred in the very bone of medieval study;
and that it would be hardly less of a mistake to expect him not
to show what seems to us a singular promiscuousness and irrele-
vancy in his display of it. But, in this display, and possibly, also,
in some of the inaccuracies, there is a very subtle and personal
agency which has sometimes been ignored altogether, while it has
seldom been fully allowed for. This is the intense, all-pervading
and all but incalculable presence of Chaucer's humour—a quality
which some, even of those who enjoy it heartily and extol it
generously, do not quite invariably seem to comprehend. Indeed,
it may be said that even among those who are not destitute of the
sense itself, such an ubiquitous, subterranean accompaniment of
it would seem to be regarded as an impossible or an uncanny
thing. As a matter of fact, however, it 'works i’ the earth so
fast' that you never can tell at what moment it will find utterance.
Many of the instances of this are familiar, and some, at least, could
hardly fail to be recognised except by portentous dulness. But it
may be questioned whether it is ever far off; and whether, as is so
often the case in that true English variety of the quality of which
it is the first and one of the most consummate representatives, it
is not mixed and streaked with seriousness and tenderness in
an almost inextricable manner. 'Il se moque,' says Taine of
another person, de ses émotions au moment même où il s'y livre. '
'
In the same way, Chaucer is perpetually seeing the humorous side,
not merely of his emotions but of his interests, his knowledge, his
beliefs, his everything. It is by no means certain that in his
displays of learning he is not mocking or parodying others as well
as relieving himself. It is by no means certain that, seriously as
we know him to have been interested in astronomy, his frequent
astronomical or astrological lucubrations are not partly ironical.
Once and once only, by a triumph of artistic self-restraint, he has
kept the ludicrous out altogether-in the exquisite Prioress's Tale,
and even there we have a sort of suggestion of the forbidden but
irrepressible thing in
As monkes been, or elles oghten be.
Of this humour, indeed, it is not too much to say (borrowing
Coleridge's dictum about Fuller and the analogous but very
different quality of wit) that it is the 'stuff and substance,' not


## p. 191 (#209) ############################################

His Humour
191
merely of Chaucer's intellect, but of his entire mental constitution.
He can, as has been said, repress it when art absolutely requires
that he should do so; but, even then, he gives himself compensa-
tions. He has kept it out of The Prioress's Tale; but he has
indemnified himself by a more than double allowance of it in his
description of the prioress's person in The Prologue. On the
other hand, it would have been quite out of place in the descrip-
tion of the knight, for whom nothing but respectful admiration is
solicited; and there is no need to suspect irony even in
And though that he were worthy, he was wys.
But in The Knight's Tale—which is so long that the personage
of the supposed teller, never obtruded, may be reasonably supposed
forgotten, and where the poet almost speaks in his own person-
the same writ does not run; and, towards the end especially, we
get the famous touches of ironic comment on life and thought,
which, though they have been unduly dwelt upon as indicating a
Voltairian tone in Chaucer, certainly are ironical in their treatment
of the riddles of the painful earth.
Further, it is desirable to notice that this humour is employed
with a remarkable difference. In most great English humorists,
humour sets the picture with a sort of vignetting or arabesquing
fringe and atmosphere of exaggeration and fantasy. By Chaucer
it is almost invariably used to bring a higher but a quite clear and
achromatic light on the picture itself or parts of it. The stuff is
turned rapidly the other way to show its real texture; the jest is
perhaps a burning, but also a magnifying and illuminating, glass,
to bring out a special trait more definitely. It is safe to say that
a great deal of the combination of vivacity and veracity in Chaucer's
portraits and sketches of all kinds is due to this all-pervading
humour; indeed, it is not very likely that any one would deny
this. What seems, for some commentators, harder to keep in
mind is that it may be, and probably is, equally present in other
places where the effect is less immediately rejoicing to the modern
reader; and that medieval pedantry, medieval catalogue-making,
medieval digression and irrelevance are at once exemplified and
satirised by the operation of this extraordinary faculty.
That the possession of such a faculty almost necessarily implies
command of pathos is, by this time, almost a truism, though it was
not always recognised. That Chaucer is an instance of it, as well
as of a third quality, good humour, which does not invariably
accompany the other two, will hardly be disputed. He is not


## p. 192 (#210) ############################################

192
Chaucer
a sentimentalist; he does not go out of his way for pathetic effect;
but, in the leading instances above noted of The Clerk's and
Prioress's Tales, supplemented by many slighter touches of the
same kind, he shows an immediate, unforced, unfaltering sym-
pathy which can hardly be paralleled. His good humour is even
more pervading. It gives a memorable distinction of kindliness
between The Wife of Bath's Prologue and the brilliant following
of it by Dunbar in The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo; and
it even separates Chaucer from such later humorists as Addison
and Jane Austen, who, though never savage, can be politely cruel.
Cruelty and Chaucer are absolute strangers ; indeed, the absence
of it has brought upon him from rather short-sighted persons the
charge of pococurantism, which has sometimes been translated (still
more purblindly) into one of mere courtliness—of a Froissart-like
indifference to anything but the quality,' 'the worth, as he
might have put it himself. Because there is indignation in Piers
the Plowman, it is thought that Chaucer does not well not to be
angry: which is uncritical.
This curious, tolerant, not in the least cynical, observation and
relish of humanity gave him a power of representing it, which has
been rarely surpassed in any respect save depth. It has been
disputed whether this power is rather that of the dramatist or that
of the novelist–a dispute perhaps arguing a lack of the historic
In the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, Chaucer
would certainly have been the one, and in the mid-nineteenth the
other. It would be most satisfactory could we have his work in
both avatars. But what we have contains the special qualities
of both craftsmen in a certain stage of development, after a fashion
which certainly leaves no room for grumbling. The author has, in
fact, set himself a high task by adopting the double system above
specified, and by giving elaborate descriptions of his personages
before he sets them to act and speak up to these descriptions.
It is a plan which, in the actual drama and the actual novel, has
been found rather a dangerous one. But Chaucer discharges him-
self victoriously of his liabilities. And the picture of life which he
has left us has captivated all good judges who have given themselves
the
very slight trouble necessary to attain the right point of view,
from his own day to this.
Something has been said of the poetic means which he used to
work this picture out. They were, practically, those which English
poetry had been elaborating for itself during the preceding two or
three centuries, since the indrafts of Latin or Romance vocabulary,
sense.


## p. 193 (#211) ############################################

His Poetical Quality 193
and the gradual disuse of inflection, had revolutionised the language.
But he perfected them, to, probably, their utmost possible point at
the time, by study of French and Italian models as regards arrange-
ment of lines in groups, and by selecting a diction which, even in
his own time, was recognised as something quite extraordinary.
The old delusion that he 'Frenchified' the language has been
nearly dispelled as regards actual vocabulary; and, in points which
touch grammar, the minute investigations undertaken in the
case of the doubtful works have shown that he was somewhat
more scrupulous than were his contemporaries in observing formal
correctness, as it is inferred to have been. The principal instance
of this scrupulousness—the management of the valued final -e,
which represented a crowd of vanished or vanishing peculiarities
of accidence-was, by a curious consequence, the main cause of
the mistakes about his verse which prevailed for some three
centuries; while the almost necessarily greater abundance of
unusual words in The Prologue, with its varied subjects, probably
had something to do with the concurrent notion that his language
was obsolete to the point of difficulty, if not to that of unintelligi-
bility. As a matter of fact, his verse (with the exception of one
or two doubtful experiments, such as the nine-syllabled line where
ten should be) is among the smoothest in English ; and there are
entire pages where, putting trifling differences of spelling aside,
hardly a single word will offer difficulties to any person of toler-
able reading in the modern tongue.
It is sometimes complained by those who admit some, if not all,
of these merits in him that he rarely-a few would say never-
rises to the level of the highest poetry. Before admitting, before
even seriously contesting, this we must have a definition of the
highest poetry which will unite the suffrages of the competent, and
this, in the last two thousand years and more, has not been attained.
It will, perhaps, be enough to say that any such definition which
excludes the finest things in Troilus and Criseyde, in The Knight's
and Prioress's Tales and in some other places, will run the risk
of suggesting itself as a mere shibboleth. That Chaucer is not
always at these heights may be granted : who is ? That he is less
often at them than some other poets need not be denied; that he
1;
has access to them must be maintained. While as to his power to
communicate poetic grace and charm to innumerable other things
less high, perhaps, but certainly not always low; as to the abound-
ing interest of his matter; as to the astonishing vividness in line
and idiom of his character-drawing and manners-painting; and,
13
E. L. II.
CH, VII.


## p. 194 (#212) ############################################

194
Chaucer
above all, as to the wonderful service which he did to the forms
and stuff of English verse and of English prose, there should be
no controversy; at least the issue of any such controversy should
not be doubtful.
One afterthought of special interest may perhaps be appended.
Supposing Skeat's very interesting and quite probable con-
jecture to be true, and granting that The Tale of Gamelyn
lay among Chaucer's papers for the more or less distinct
purpose of being worked up into a Canterbury 'number,' it
is not idle to speculate on the probable result, especially in
the prosodic direction. In all his other models or stores of
material, the form of the original had been French, or Latin, or
Italian prose or verse, or else English verse or (perhaps in rare
cases) prose, itself modelled more or less on Latin or on French.
In all his workings on and after these models and materials, his
own form had been a greatly improved following of the same
kind, governed not slavishly, but distinctly, by an inclination
towards the Latin-French models themselves in so far as they
could be adapted, without loss, to English. Pure unmetrical
alliteration he had definitely rejected, or was definitely to reject,
in the famous words of the Parson. But in Gamelyn he had,
or would have had, an original standing between the two-and
representing the earliest, or almost the earliest, concordat or com-
promise between them. As was observed in the account given of
Gamelyn itself in the chapter on Metrical Romances, it is, generally
speaking, of the 'Robert-of-Gloucester' type-the type in which
the centrally divided, alliterative, non-metrical line has retained its
central division but has discarded alliterative-accentual necessity,
has taken on rime and has adopted a roughly but distinctly
metrical cadence. If, however, we compare Gamelyn (which is
put by philologists at about 1340) with Robert himself (who pro-
bably finished writing some 40 years earlier) some interesting
differences will be seen, which become more interesting still in
connection with the certainly contemporary rise of the ballad
metre of four short lines, taking the place of the two centre-
broken long ones. Comparing the Gamelyn execution with that
of Robert, that, say, of the Judas ballad and that of the earliest
Robin Hood pieces and others, one may note in it interesting
variations of what may be called an elliptic-eccentric kind. The
centre pin of the verse-division is steady; but it works, not in a
i Volume 1, p. 298.


## p. 195 (#213) ############################################

Chaucer and Gamelyn 195
round socket proportionate to itself so much as in a kind of
curved slot, and, as it slips up and down this, the resulting verse
takes curiously different, though always homogeneous, forms. The
exact ‘fourteener,' or eight and six without either lengthening or
shortening, is not extremely common, but it occurs often enough.
More commonly the halves (especially the second) are slightly
shortened; and, not unfrequently, they are lengthened by the
admission of trisyllabic feet. There is an especial tendency to
make the second half up of very short feet as in
Sik | ther, he lay |
where an attempt to scan
Sik ther he lay
1
will disturb the whole rhythm; and a tendency (which forewards
us of Milton) to cut the first syllable and begin with a trochee as
in the refrain beginning
Litheth and listeneth
in
Al thi londe that he hadde
and so on. While, sometimes, we get the full anapaestic ex-
tension
The frankeleyn seyde to the champioun: of him stood him noon eye.
And, in the same way, the individual lines indicate, in various
directions, the settlement of the old long line towards the deca-
syllable, towards the alexandrine, towards the 'fourteener' and
towards the various forms of doggerel, themselves giving birth to
the pure four-anapaest line which we find in the early sixteenth
century. Now the question is: 'Would the necessary attention to
these metrical peculiarities, implied in the process of (in Dryden's
sense) “translation," have produced any visible effect on Chaucer's
own prosody ? ' Nor is this by any means an idle question. That
Chaucer was a great mimic in metre, we know from Sir Thopas,
where he has exactly hit off the namby-pamby amble of the
“romance six' in its feeblest examples. Now this romance six
is very near to the ballad foursome have even guessed that the
latter is a 'crushed' form of it, though this is, perhaps, reversing
the natural order of thought. Would Chaucer have tried the
ballad four itself-regularising and characterising it as he did
other metres? Or would his study of the extremely composite and
germinal kind of verse in which, as has been shown, Gamelyn is
written, have resulted in the earlier development of some of these
:
germs?
13-2


## p. 196 (#214) ############################################

196
Chaucer
The question, let it be repeated, is by no means idle. That
the developments actually took place in the next century and a
half, at the hands of lesser men, shows, conclusively, that they might
have taken place, and probably would, at the hands of a greater
one earlier. But: 'Ought we to be sorry that they did not '-
though again not idle, is a very different question and one to
which the answer should probably be 'No' and not ‘Yes. '
For the impending linguistic changes, which ruined Chaucer's
actual decasyllable in the hands of his actual successors, would
probably, have played even greater havoc with freer and looser
measures, if he had attempted them. And if he had made a strict
eight and six, as he did a strict eight eight six in Sir Thopas, the
danger of rigid syllabic uniformity being regarded as the law of
English prosody—a danger actual for centuries—would have been
very much increased. As it was, these half-wildings of verse con-
tinued to grow in their natural way, without being converted into
'hybrid perpetuals' by the skill of any capital horticulturist. They.
remained in striking contrast to the formal couplets and stanzas :
reliefs from them, outlets, escapes. It did not matter if they were
badly done, for they carried no weight as models or masters: it
mattered supremely if they were well done, for they helped to
tune the national ear. They were in no vituperative sense the
corpora vilia in which experiment could be freely and inexpen-
sively made : though the experiments themselves were sometimes
far from vile. Therefore, one need not weep that Chaucer let
Gamelyn alone. He would have given us a delightful story, but
the story is full of delight for competent readers as it is. If he
had made it into 'riding rime’ it would not have been better, as
such, than its companions. If he had made it into anything else it
might have been a doubtful gain. And, lastly, the copy might, as in
so many other cases, have killed the original. Now, even for more
,
Chaucer, of which we fortunately have so much already, we could
not afford to have no Gamelyn, which is practically unique.
a


## p. 197 (#215) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS
The influence of Chaucer upon English poetry of all dialects,
during the entire century which followed his death, and part, at
least, of the next, is something to which there is hardly a parallel in
literature. We have to trace it in the present chapter as regards the
southern forms of the language : its manifestation in the northern
. being reserved for separate treatment. But, while there is absolutely
no doubt about its extent and duration, the curiously uncritical
habit of the time manifests itself in the fact that, after the very
earliest period, not merely Gower, who has been dealt with already,
but a third writer, himself the first and strongest instance of this
very influence, is, as it were, co-opted' into the governance which
he has himself experienced ; and Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate
are invoked as of conjoint and nearly equal authority. So with
Lydgate we must begin.
It was no part of the generous and spontaneous, if not
always wisely allotted, adoration which the Middle Ages paid
to their literary masters to indulge in copious biographical notices
of them; the rather numerous details that we possess about
Chaucer are almost wholly concerned with him as a member, in one
way or another, of the public service, not as a poet. Now Lydgate
(though his membership of a monastic order would not, necessarily,
have excluded him from such occupations) seems, as a matter of
fact, to have had nothing to do with them; and we know, in
consequence, very little about him. That his name was John, that
he took, as was very common, his surname from his birthplace, a
Suffolk village, but just on the border of Cambridgeshire, and that
he was a monk of the great Suffolk abbey of St Edmund's Bury, are
data; he was, in fact, and even still is, from habit or affectation,
spoken of as 'the monk of Bury,' as often as by his own name.
But further documentary evidence is very slight and almost wholly
concerned with his professional work; even his references to him-


## p. 198 (#216) ############################################

198 The English Chaucerians
self, which are by no means unfrequent, amount to little more than
that he had not so much money as he would have liked to have,
that he had more work than he would have liked to have and that
he wore spectacles-three things not rare among men of letters-
besides those concerning the place of his birth and his entry into
religion at fifteen years of age. Tradition and inference—sometimes
the one, sometimes the other, sometimes both-date his birth at
about 1370 and assign Oxford as the place of his education, with
subsequent studies in France and Italy. He seems, at any rate, from
his own assertion in an apparently genuine poem, to have been at
Paris perhaps more than once. His expressions as regards 'bis
mayster Chaucer' may, possibly, imply personal acquaintance.
Formal documents exist for his admission to minor, subdiaconal,
diaconal and priest's orders at different dates between 1388—9 and
1397. He (or some other John Lydgate) is mentioned in certain
documents concerning Bury in 1415 and 1423, in which latter
year he was also elected prior of Hatfield Broadoak. Eleven years
later, he received licence to return to the parent monastery. He
had divers patrons—duke Humphrey of Gloucester being one.
References to a small pension, paid to him jointly with one John
Baret, exist for the years 1441 and 1446; and it has been thought
that a reference to him in Bokenam's Saints' Lives as 'now exist-
ing' is of the same year as this last. Beyond 1446, we hear
nothing positive of him. It is thus reasonable to fix his career
as lasting from c. 1370 to c. 1450.
If this be so, his life was not short: and it is quite certain that
such exercises of his art as we possess are very long. The enormous
catalogue of his work which occurs in Ritson's Bibliographia
Poetica, extending to many pages and 251 separate items, has
been violently attacked : it certainly will not stand examination
either as free from duplicates or as confined to certain or probable
attributions. But it was a great achievement for its time; and it has
not been superseded by anything which would be equally useful to
whoever shall desire to play Tyrwhitt to Lydgate's Chaucer. Until
quite recently, indeed, the study of Lydgate was only to be pursued
under almost prohibitive difficulties ; for, though, in consequence of
his great popularity, many of his works were issued by our early
printers, from Caxton to Tottel, these issues are now accessible
only here and there in the largest libraries. Moreover they-and it
would seem also the MSS which are slowly being brought in to
supplement them-present, as a rule, texts of an extreme badness,
which may or may not be due to copyists and printers. Till


## p. 199 (#217) ############################################

Lydgate
199
nearly the close of the nineteenth century nothing outside these
MSS and early prints was accessible at all, except the Minor
Poems printed by Halliwell for the Percy Society, and the Story of
T'hebes and other pieces included among Chaucer's works in the
older editions down to Chalmers's Poets. During the last fifteen
years, the Early English Text Society has given us The Temple
of Glass, The Secrets of the Philosophers (finished by Burgh),
The Assembly of Gods, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man,
two Nightingale Poems, Reason and Sensuality and part of the
Troy Book; while the Cambridge University Press has issued
facsimiles of Caxton's The Churl and the Bird and The Horse,
the Sheep and the Goose, reprinted earlier for the Roxburghe Club.
These, however, to which may be added a few pieces printed
elsewhere, form a very small part of what Lydgate wrote, the total
of which, even as it exists, has been put at about 140,000 lines. Half
of this, or very nearly half, is contained in two huge works, the Troy
Book of 30,000 lines, and The Falls of Princes, adapted from
Boccaccio, his most famous and, perhaps, most popular book,
which is more than 6000 lines longer. The Pilgrimage of Man
itself extends to over 20,000 lines and the other pieces mentioned
above to about 17,000 more. The remainder is made up of divers
saints' lives-- Our Lady, Albon and Amphabel, Edmund and
Fremund, St Margaret, St Austin, St Giles and the Miracles of St
Edmund-varying from five or six thousand lines to three or four
hundred; another allegorical piece, The Court of Sapience, of over
2000; poems less but still fairly long bearing the titles Aesop, De
Duobus Mercatoribus, Testament, Danse Macabre, a version of Guy
of Warwick, December and July and The Flower of Courtesy;
with a large number of ballades and minor pieces.
The authenticity of many of these is not very easy to establish,
and it is but rarely that their dates can be ascertained with anything
like certainty. A few things, such as the verses for queen
Margaret's entry into London, date themselves directly; and some
of the saints' lives appear to be assignable with fair certainty, but
most are extremely uncertain. And it does not seem quite safe to
assume that all the shorter and better poems belong to the earlier
years, all the longer and less good ones to the later.
The truth is that there is hardly any whole poem, and ex-
ceedingly few, if any, parts of poems, in Lydgate so good that we
should be surprised at his being the author of even the worst thing
attributed to him. He had some humour: it appears fairly enough
in his best known and, perhaps, best thing, the very lively little poem


## p. 200 (#218) ############################################

200 The English Chaucerians
called London Lickpenny (not 'Lackpenny' as it used to be read),
which tells the woes of a country suitor in the capital. And it
appears again, sometimes in the immense and curious Pilgrimage,
a translation from Deguileville, which undoubtedly stands in some
relation-though at how many stages nothing but the wildest
guessing would undertake to determine—to The Pilgrim's Progress
itself. But this humour was never concentrated to anything like
Chaucerian strength; while of Chaucerian vigour, Chaucerian
pathos, Chaucerian vividness of description, Lydgate had no trace
or tincture.
To these defects he added two faults, one of which Chaucer had
never exhibited in any great measure, and from the other of
which he freed himself completely. The one is prosodic in-
competence ; the other is longwinded prolixity. The very same
reasons which made him an example of the first made his con-
temporaries insensible of it; and, in Elizabethan times, he was
praised for 'good verse' simply because the Elizabethans did not
understand what was good or what was bad in Middle English
versification. Fresh attempts have recently been made to claim
for him at least systematic if mistaken ideas in this respect ; but
they reduce themselves either to an allegation of anarchy in all
English verse, which can be positively disproved, or to a mere
classification of prosodic vices, as if this made them virtues.
The worst of Lydgate's apparently systematic roughness is a
peculiar line, broken at the caesura, with a gap left in the
breaking as in the following,
For specheles nothing mayst thou spede,
OP,
Might make a thing so celestial.
This extraordinary discord, of which some have striven to
find one or two examples in Chaucer, is abundant in Lydgate
and has been charitably connected with the disuse of the final e
-in the use of which, however, the same apologists sometimes
represent Lydgate as rather orthodox. Unfortunately, it is not,
by a long way, the only violation of harmony to be found in him.
That some of his poems—for instance, The Falls of Princes-are
better than his average in this respect, and that some, such as The
Story of Thebes, are worse, has been taken as suggesting that
the long-suffering copyist or printer is to blame; but this will
hardly suffice. Indeed, Lydgate himself, perhaps, in imitation of
Chaucer, but with reason such as Chaucer never had, declares that


## p. 201 (#219) ############################################

Lydgate
201
at one time (as tho ') he had no skill of metre. It is enough to say
that, even in rime royal, his lines wander from seven to fourteen
syllables, without the possibility of allowing monosyllabic or
trisyllabic feet in any fashion that shall restore the rhythm ; and
that his couplets, as in The Story of Thebes itself, seem often to be
unaware whether they are themselves octosyllabic or decasyllabic-
four-footed or five-footed. He is, on the whole, happiest in his
ostensible octosyllabics-a metre not, indeed, easy to achieve con-
summately, but admitting of fair performance without much trouble,
and not offering any great temptation to excessive irregularity.
Unluckily, this very metre tempted Lydgate to fall into what is
to most people, perhaps, his unforgivable fault-prolixity and
verbiage. It has, now and then, enticed even the greatest into these
errors or close to them: and Lydgate was not of the greatest.
But it shows him, perhaps, as well as any other, except in very
short pieces like the Lickpenny.
He is, accordingly, out of these short pieces and a few detached
stanzas of his more careful rime royal, hardly anywhere seen to
more advantage than in the huge and curious translation from
Guillaume de Deguileville which has been referred to above. Its
want of originality places it at no disadvantage ; for it is very
doubtful whether Lydgate ever attempted any work of size that was
not either a direct translation or more than based upon some
previous work of another author. This quaint allegory, with
absolutely nothing of Bunyan's compactness of action, or of his
living grasp of character, or of his perfect, if plain, phrase, has a far
more extensive and varied conglomeration of adventure, and not
merely carries its pilgrim through preliminary theological diffi-
culties, through a Romance-of-the-Rose insurrection of Nature
and Aristotle against Grace, through an immense process of
arming which amplifies St Paul's famous text into thousands of
lines, through conflicts with the Seven Deadly Sins and the more
dangerous companionship of the damsel Youth—but conducts him
to the end through strange countries of sorcery and varied ex-
periences, mundane and religious. Thus, the very multitude and the
constant phantasmagoric changes of scene and story save the poet
from dulness, some leave of skipping being taken at the doctrinal
and argumentative passages. In the “Youth' part and in not a
few others he is lively, and not too diffuse.
Scarcely as much can be said of the still longer version of Guido
delle Colonne's Hystoria Troiana, which we possess in some 30,000
lines of heroic couplet, with a prologue of the same and an epilogue
6


## p. 202 (#220) ############################################

202 The English Chaucerians
in rime royal. To say that it is the dullest of the many ver-
sions we have would be rash, but the present writer does not
know where to put his hand upon a duller, and it is certainly
inferior to the Scots alliterative form, which may be of about the
same date. Part of its weakness may be due to the fact that
Lydgate was less successful with the heroic couplet than, perhaps,
with any other measure, and oftener used his broken-backed
line in it. But the poem was twice printed, huge as it is, and was
condensed and modernised by Heywood as late as 1614.
The theme of the Tale of Troy, indeed, can never wholly lack
interest, nor is interest wanting in Lydgate's poem. In this respect
he was more successful with the yet again huger Falls of Princes or
Tragedies of John Bochas. But this, also, was popular and produced
a family more deplorable, almost, than itself (with one or two well
known exceptions) in The Mirror for Magistrates of the next century.
Its only redeeming point is the comparative merit, already noticed,
of its rime royal. To this we may return: a few words must now
be said of some other productions of Lydgate. For what reason
some have assigned special excellence to Reason and Sensuality,
and have, accordingly, determined that it must be the work of his
poetic prime, is not very easy to discover. It is in octosyllables,
and, as has been said, he is usually happier there than in heroics or
in rime royal ; it is certainly livelier in subject than most of his
works ; and it is evidently composed under a fresher inspiration
from the Rose itself than is generally the case with those cankered
rose leaves, the allegoric poems of the fifteenth century; while its
direct original, the unprinted Échecs amoureux, is said to have
merit. But, otherwise, there is not much to be said for it. Its
subject is a sort of cento of the favourite motifs of the time-
Chess; Fortune (not with her wheel but with tuns of sweet and
bitter drink); the waking, the spring morning and garden; Nature;
the judgment of Paris ; the strife between Venus and Diana for the
author's allegiance; the Garden of Delight and its dangers; and the
Forest of Reason, with a most elaborate game of chess again to
finish-or, rather, not to finish, for the piece breaks off at about its
seven-thousandth line. It is possible that the argument of earliness
is correct, for some of the descriptions are fresh and not twice
battered as Lydgate's often are ; and there seems to be a certain
zest in the writing, instead of the groaning weariness which so
frankly meets the reader halfway elsewhere.
The Temple of Glass, partly in heroics, partly in rime royal, is
one of the heaviest of fifteenth century allegorical love-poems, in


## p. 203 (#221) ############################################

Lydgate
203
which two lovers complain to Venus and, having been answered
by her, are finally united. It is extremely prosaic ; but, by sheer
editing, has been brought into a condition of at least more
systematic prosody than most of Lydgate's works. The Assembly
of Gods is a still heavier allegory of vices and virtues presented
under the names of divinities, major and minor, of the ancient
pantheon, but brought round to an orthodox Christian conclusion.
The piece is in rime royal of the loosest construction, so much
so that its editor proposes a merely rhythmical scansion.
By far the best and most poetical passages in Lydgate's vast
work are to be found in The Life of Our Lady, from which Warton
long ago managed to extract more than one batch of verses to
which he assigned the epithets of elegant and harmonious' as
well as the more doubtful praise of 'so modern a cast. ' It is
possible that these citations and encomia are responsible for the
good opinion which some have formed of the poet ; but it is to
be feared that they will wander far and wearily among Lydgate's
myriads of lines without coming upon the equals of
6
6
Like as the dewe discendeth on the rose
In silver drops,
or,
0 thoughtful herte, plonged in dystresse,
With slomber of slouthe this longe winter's night-
Out of the slepe of mortal hevinesse
Awake anon! and loke upon the light
Of thilke starr;
or,
And he that made the high and crystal heven,
The firmament, and also every sphere;
The Golden ax-tree and the starres seven,
Citherea so lusty for to appere
And redde Marse with his sterne here.
The subject which never failed to inspire every medieval poet who
was capable of inspiration has not failed here.
The best of Lydgate's Saints' Lives proper appears to be the
Saint Margaret; it is very short, and the innumerable previous
handlings of the story, which has intrinsic capabilities, may have
stood him in good stead. On the other hand, the long Edınund
and Fremund, in celebration of the saint whom the poet was
more especially bound to honour, though spoken of by some
with commendation, is a feeble thing, showing no skill of narration.
It is not in quite such bad rime royal as Lydgate can sometimes
write; but, even here, the plangency of which the metre is capable,


## p. 204 (#222) ############################################

204
The English Chaucerians
and which would have come in well, is quite absent; while the
poem is characterised throughout by the flattest and dullest
diction. The two Nightingale poems are religious-allegorical.
They are both in rime royal and average not more than 400
lines each.
The beast-fable had something in it peculiarly suitable to
Lydgate's kind of genius (as, indeed, to medieval genius generally)
and this fact is in favour of his Aesop and of the two poems
(among bis best) which are called The Churl and the Bird and The
Horse, the Sheep and the Goose. Of these two pieces, both very
favourite examples of the moral tale of eastern origin which was
disseminated through Europe widely by various collections as well
as in individual specimens, The Churl is couched in rime royal
and The Horse in the same metre, with an envoy or moralitas
in octaves. Both are contained, though not completely, in Halliwell's
edition of the minor poems. The actual Aesop—a small collection
of Aesopic fables which is sometimes assigned to Lydgate's earliest
period, perhaps to his residence at Oxford-is pointless enough,
and contrasts very unfavourably with Henryson's. But the
remainder of these minor poems, whatever the certainty of their
attribution, includes Lydgate's most acceptable work :-London
Lickpenny itself; the Ballade of the Midsummer Rose, where 'the
eternal note of sadness' and change becomes musical even in him;
the sly advice to an old man who wished for a young wife; the
satire on horned head-dresses; The Prioress and her Three
Suitors; the poet's Testament; the sincere . Thank God of all'
and others.
The Complaint of the Black Knight, for long assigned to
Chaucer, though not quite worthy of him, is better than most
of Lydgate's poems, though it has his curious flatness; and
it might, perhaps, be prescribed as the best beginning for those
who wish to pass from the study of the older and greater poet
to that of his pupil.
Lydgate has not lacked defenders, who would be formidable
if their locus standi were more certain. The fifteenth century
adored him because he combined all its own worst faults, and the
sixteenth seems to have accepted him because it had no apparatus
for criticism. When, after a long eclipse, he was in two senses
taken up by Gray, that poet seems chiefly to have known The Falls
of Princes, in which, perhaps by dint of long practice, Lydgate's
metrical shortcomings are less noticeable than in some other places,
and where the dignity and gravity of Boccaccio's Latin has, to some


## p. 205 (#223) ############################################

Lydgate
205
6
6
>
extent, invigorated his style. Warton is curiously guarded in his
opinions; and a favourable judgment of Coleridge may, possibly, be
regarded as very insufficiently based. The apologies of editors
(especially those who are content with systematised metre, how-
ever inharmonious) do not go very far. On the whole, though
Ritson's condemnation may have been expressed with characteristic
extravagance and discourtesy towards the voluminous, prosaic and
drivelling monk, nobody can dispute the voluminousness in the
worst sense, and it is notable that even Lydgate's defenders, in pro-
portion as they know more of him, are apt to confess and avoid the
'prosaic' and to slip occasionally into admissions rather near the
drivelling. It is to be feared that some such result is inevitable.
A little Lydgate, especially if the little be judiciously chosen, or
happily allotted by chance, is a tolerable thing: though even this
can hardly be very delectable to any well qualified judge of poetry.
But, the longer and wider that acquaintance with him is extended,
the more certain is dislike to make its appearance. The prosodic
incompetence cannot be entirely due to copyists and printers;
the enormous verbosity, the ignorance how to tell a story, the
want of freshness, vigour, life, cannot be due to them at all.
But what is most fatal of all is the flatness of diction noticed
above the dull, hackneyed, slovenly phraseology, only thrown
up by his occasional aureate pedantry-which makes the common
commoner and the uncommon uninteresting. Lydgate himself,
or some imitator of him, has been credited with the phrase 'gold
dewdrops of speech about Chaucer. He would hardly have
thought of anything so good; but the phrase at least suggests an
appropriate variant, 'leaden splashes,' for his own.
The inseparable companion in literature of Lydgate is Thomas
Occleve or Hoccleve; whether this companionship extended to life
we do not know, though they may, perhaps, have had a common
friend in Chaucer, whose portrait adorns one of Occleve's MSS, and
of whom he speaks with personal warmth. This portrait is one
chief reason which we have for gratitude to Occleve; but it
is not the only one. In the first place, we have from him
what seems to be at least possibly autograph writing, a contri-
bution to our knowledge of the actual language and metre of
the work which (though one cannot but wish it came from Chaucer
himself) would, if certain, be of the greatest value. In the
second place, he has added, by some autobiographical confidences
which make him in a very weak and washed out way, it is
true) a sort of English and crimeless Villon, to the actual picture


## p. 206 (#224) ############################################

206
The English Chaucerians
of his times that we have in Lydgate's Lickpenny. His surname is
supposed, as that of his fellow Lydgate is known, to be a place-name,
and the nearest form is that of Hockliffe or Hocclyve in Bedfordshire.
But both Ock- and Hock- are common prefixes all over the south
and the midlands, while -cleve and -cliff are equally common
suffixes. In a Dialogue, he appears to assign his fifty-third year to
the twelve-month just before Henry V's death in 1422 : so that he
must have been born about 1368. In another poem, some ten
years earlier, the De Regimine Principum, he says that he had
been 'twenty years and four' in the office of the Privy Seal, which
gives us another date-say 1387—for his entrance there at the very
probable age of nineteen or so. He is also mentioned as actually a
clerk in a document apparently of that year. He thought of taking
orders, but did not : though, in 1399, he received a pension of £10
till he should receive a benefice (without cure of souls) of double
the value. Various entries of payments of this pension exist,
and also of office expenses. In 1406, he wrote the curious
poem above referred to, La Male Règle, in which he begs for
payment and confesses a long course of mild dissipation. His
salary was very small: under £4, apparently. He seems at one
time to have lived at Chester's inn in the Strand, and to have
married about 1411, being then over forty. About five years
later, he was out of his mind for a time. In 1409, his pension
had been increased to £13. 68. 8d. Not till 1424 did he get a
benefice—at least, a 'corrody' or charge on a monastery-but
we do not know the amount. And how long he enjoyed this we
also do not know. Tradition, rather than any positive authority,
extends his life as long as Lydgate's or (if he was born earlier)
a little longer, and puts his death also at about 1450. But it is
difficult to say how much of this is due to the curious and
intangible fellowship which has established itself between the two
poets. This fellowship, however, did not, at the time, carry Occleve
into the position assigned to Lydgate by subsequent versifiers ;
nor did it assure him equal attention from the early printers. We
are, indeed, even yet, in considerable uncertainty as to the extent
of his work that is in existence : some of what he probably wrote
having not yet been printed, while some of the things printed as
his are doubtful. This uncertainty, however, does not extend to
a fairly large body of work. The most important piece of this
is De Regimine Principum or Regiment of Princes, addressed
to Henry prince of Wales, and extending in all to some 5500
verses. Not more than 3500 of these contain the actual advice,
6


## p. 207 (#225) ############################################

Occleve
207
which is on a par with the contents of several other poems
mentioned in this chapter-partly political, partly ethical, partly
religious, and based on a blending of Aristotle with Solomon.
The introduction of 2000 verses, however (the greater part of which
consists of a dialogue between the poet and a beggar), is less
commonplace and much more interesting, containing more bio-,
graphical matter, the address to Chaucer, a quaint wail over the
troubles of the scribe and other curious things. Next to this
in importance come two verse-stories from Gesta Romanorum,
The Emperor Jereslaus's Wife and Jonathas; the rather piquant
Male Règle with the confessions above referred to; a Complaint
and Dialogue, also largely autobiographical ; and a really fine Ars
Sciendi Mori, the most dignified, and the most poetical, thing
that Occleve has left us. We have also a number of shorter poems,
from ballades upwards, some of which are datable, and the dating
of one of which at about 1446 by Tyrwhitt, as relating to prince
Edward of Lancaster, is the nearest approach to warrant for the
extension of the poet's life to the middle of the century.
There is no doubt that Occleve-like Pepys and some other,
but not all, talkers about themselves-has found himself none
the worse off for having committed to paper numerous things
which any one but a garrulous, egotistic and not very strong-
minded person would have omitted. Nor can it exactly be
counted to him as a literary merit that he does not seem to have
been at all an unamiable person. Nor, lastly, is his wisdom in
abstaining from extremely long poems more than a negative
virtue. Yet all these things do undoubtedly, in this way and that,
make the reading of Occleve less toilsome than that of Lydgate;
though the latter can, on rare occasions, write better than Occleve
ever does, though he is immeasurably Occleve's superior in
learning and industry and though (again at his best) he is
slightly his superior in versification. Though lesser in every
other sense, one merit Occleve may claim that he has some
idea how to tell a story. Neither Jereslaus nor Jonathas is
lacking in this respect; and though, of course, they are not original,
neither is anything of Lydgate's in this kind that we know of.
In aureateness or heavily pompous diction, there is not much
to choose, though Lydgate knows a little better how to make use
of his ornaments. Prosodically, the chief difference seems to be that
Occleve has the actual number of syllables that should be in a
verse rather more clearly before him, though he is, perhaps,
Lydgate's inferior in communicating to them anything like


## p. 208 (#226) ############################################

208
The English Chaucerians
poetic rhythm. He generally uses rime royal, but, like almost all
these poets, varies it, occasionally, with octaves. Neither couplet
seems to have had strong attraction for him.
Of the poems not yet noticed, that to Sir John Oldcastle, written
about 1415 and some five hundred lines long, has a certain historical
interest and something of the actuality which Occleve often manages
to communicate. Every now and then, too, it stumbles on a
vigorous line, as in
The fiend is your chief: and our Head is God.
Indeed, Occleve, seldom good at a sustained passage or even
stanza, does, sometimes, hit off good single lines. This piece is in
octaves; The Letter of Cupid to Lovers is of about the same
length and also of some merit. It is imitated, of course in this
case from Christine de Pisan. The Mother of God, once assigned
to Chaucer, is rather better than The Complaint of the Virgin:
but the latter is certainly translated and the former probably so.
A curious contrast, but one quite in Occleve's usual manner, to the
serious and woful ballades to which we are accustomed, is to be
found in that to Sir Henry Sommer, chancellor of the exchequer,
in reference to a club dinner to be held by a certain society
called the Court of Good Company,' and, apparently, to be mainly
provided by the said Sir Henry. To the same person are addressed
a poetical petition for the payment of arrears of salary, and a
punning roundel, 'Somer, that rypest mannes sustenance. ' These
are, in fact, the things which make Occleve, no matter what his
technical shortcomings, refreshing, for it is certainly, in verse
even more than in prose, better to read about good fellowship or
even about personal troubles than to be compelled to peruse
commonplaces on serious subjects, put without any freshness in
expression and manner. Even Wordsworth might, in such a case,
have preferred 'personal talk. '
The task of continuing one of Lydgate's last and most prosaic
works was taken up by a younger writer, Benet or Benedict Burgh,
from whom we have some other things. Burgh is said to have
had his education at Oxford, and, probably, had his extraction from
Essex, where he was, in 1440, made rector of Sandon. He was also
tutor in the Bourchier family, and successively rector of Sible
Hedingham, archdeacon of Colchester, prebendary (1477) of St
Paul's and canon of St Stephen's at Westminster, which latter
benefice he held at his death in 1483. Besides his completion of
The Secrets of the Philosophers, which seems to have been done


## p. 209 (#227) ############################################

Burgh
209
to order, we have a poem of Burgh's in praise of, and addressed
to, Lydgate himself, A Christmas Game, Aristotle's A B C and
a version of the famous distichs attributed to Cato, which was
printed by Caxton separately, before he attempted his own trans-
lation. The last piece has been spoken of as showing versification
superior to that of Burgh's other work, but this is only partially
true. His favourite metre is rime royal, which he manages with
all the staggering irregularity common to English poets of the
fifteenth century, and not fully explicable by the semi-animate
condition of the final -e and some other things of the kind. Burgh's
earlier equivalents for the so-called decasyllable vary numerically
from seven syllables to fourteen : no principle of metrical equiva-
lence and substitution being for the most part able to effect even a
tolerable correspondence between their rhythm, which is constantly
of the following kind :
When from the high hille, I mean the mount Canice.
Poem to Lydgate, I, 45.
Secunde of the persone the magnificence royale.
Secrets, I, 1558.
The opening verses (which probably gave rise to the opinion
above recorded) of Cato are more regular, the author having had
by this time about thirty years' practice and having attained a
certain Occlevian power of counting on his fingers. But he relapses
later and we have lines like these
Mannes soule resembleth a newe plain table
In whiche yet apperith to sight no picture
The philosophre saith withouten fable
Right so is mannes soule but a dedly figure
Unto the tyme she be reclaimed with the lure
Of doctrine and so gete hir a good habit
To be expert in cunnyng science and prouffit. Bk. 1, st. 2.
Even here may be noticed that strong tendency towards the
alexandrine which is notable in all the disorderly verse of this
time, and which attempted to establish and regularise itself in the
poetry of the earlier Elizabethans, making its last and greatest
effort in Polyolbion.
There is no poetry in Burgh : there could not well be any; and
there is, and there could be, as little in George Ashby, clerk of the
signet to queen Margaret of Anjou, who, being imprisoned in the
Fleet, c. 1461-3, for debt and other causes which he makes more
obscure, wrote there fifty rime royal stanzas of reflection and
14
E. L. II.
CH. VIII.


## p. 210 (#228) ############################################

210 The English Chaucerians
self-condolence on his state. At a more uncertain time, but in his
a
own eightieth year, he composed, in the same metre, a longer poem
on the Active Policy of a Prince, intended to instruct the ill-fated
son of Margaret and Henry before they stabbed [him) in the field
by Tewkesbury. A yet larger collection, in the same stanza but
detached, of more sayings of the philoshers’ is also attributed to
Ashby : didactic verse being particularly dear to that troubled and
gloomy century. The sense is sound and often shrewd enough,
showing the rather Philistine and hard but canny temper of the
later Middle Ages ; and the verse is not so irregular as in some of
Ashby's contemporaries. But it is not illumined by one spark of
the divine fire. As none of these versifiers is everywhere accessible,
a single stanza, fairly average in character, may be given :
Yf ye cannot bringe a man by mekenesse,
By swete glosyng wordes and fare langage,
To the entente of your noble bighnesse,
Correcte him sharpely with rigorous rage,
To his chastysment and ferful damage.
For who that wol nat be feire entreted
Must be foule and rigorously threted.
To the same rime royal division-as a later member of it, but
still partly before 1500—belongs Henry Bradshaw, a monk of St
Werburgh's abbey at Chester (his native place), who has left a
large life of his patroness, extending to those of Etheldreda and
Sexburga, and a good deal of profane history of Chester and
Mercia at large. It thus has a variety and quality of subject con-
trasting favourably with the didactic monotony of the works just
mentioned ; and it is not specially unreadable so far as treatment
is concerned, while students of literary history will be interested to
find that the author, paying the invariable compliment to Chaucer
and Lydgate, omits Gower, but substitutes his own contempo-
raries,
To pregnant Barclay now being religious,
To inventive Skelton and poet-laureate.
Bradshaw died in 1513: and his poem was printed by Pynson
eight years later. In prosody it is one of the most remarkable
documents as to the complete loss of grip which had come upon
English verse. It has been charitably suggested that, in place of
Chaucerian decasyllable, Bradshaw retains the 'old popular long
line,' whatever that may be. To which it can only be replied
that if he did not mean decasyllables he constantly stumbles into


## p. 211 (#229) ############################################

Bradshaw. The Alchemists
2II
them; and that, elsewhere, his lines are neither like those of
Robert of Gloucester, nor like those of Gamelyn, but frank
pieces of prose rimed at the end and cut anyhow to a length
which is, perhaps, on the average, nearer to that of an alexandrine
than to any other standard, but almost entirely rhythmless. If he
is not quite so shambling as some of his predecessors and con-
temporaries, he is, throughout, steadily pedestrian. His verse,
perhaps as well as anything else, makes us understand the wrath
of the next generation with ‘beggarly balducktoom riming. '
A still more noteworthy set of instances of the all-powerful
attraction of rime royal, and a curious and not uninteresting
section of the followers of Chaucer, is provided by the fifteenth
century writers in verse on alchemy. This following is of sub-
stance, as well as in forms, as the mention of The Canon's Yeoman's
Tale is sufficient to show. And there is the further noteworthy
point that each of the two chief of these writers follows one
of Chaucer's main narrative measures, the couplet and rime
royal.
These are George Ripley (called 'Sir' George merely as a
priest) and Thomas Norton, both of whom, by their own testimony,
wrote in the eighth decade of the fifteenth century, and who, by
tradition though not certainly, were connected as master and
pupil. Of neither is much known; and of Ripley scarcely any-
thing except that he was an Augustinian and canon of Bridlington
-the connection with Chaucer's canon being again interesting.
His principal English work, The Compound of Alchemy or the
Twelve Gates, was, as the author tells us, written in the year 1471,
and was printed 120 years later by Ralph Rabbards. Ashmole,
who reprinted it (after, as he says, comparison with several MSS)
in bis Theatrum Chemicum of 1652, included therein several
minor verse-pamphlets on the same subject, attributed to the
same author-the most interesting being an English preface, in
octosyllabic rime royal of tolerable regularity, to his Medulla
Alchemiae, written five years later than The Compound, and
dedicated to archbishop Nevill. The Compound itself is spoken of
by Warton (delusively enough, though he explains what he means
or, at least, indicates his own laxness of speech) as 'in the
octave stanza. As a matter of fact, it consists of a Titulus
Operis and a dedication to Edward IV, both written in octaves,
and of a body of text, prologue, preface and the twelve gates
('Calcination,' 'Solution, etc. , up to 'Projection') in rime royal.
The first stanza of this preface is no ill example of the
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212 The English Chaucerians
aureate language and of the hopelessly insubordinate metre
common at this time:
O hygh ynecomprehensyble and gloryous Mageste,
Whose luminos bemes obtundyth our speculation,
One-hode in Substance, 0 Tryne-hode in Deite,
Of Hierarchicall Jubylestes the gratulant gloryfycation;
O pytewouse puryfyer of Soules and puer perpetuation;
O deviant fro danger, O drawer most deboner,
Fro thys envios valey of vanyte, 0 our Exalter!
It was common, however, to overflow in this manner at the
beginning of a poem; and the bulk of Ripley's text is more
moderately phrased, though there is not much more to be said
for the metre. Even the final distichs, which, in rime royal, un-
doubtedly did a great deal to help on the formal couplet, are
exceedingly lax and, sometimes, as in
I am a master of that Art
I warrant us we shall have part,
(Ashmole, p. 157),
purely octosyllabic. The matter, allowing for the nature of
the subject, is not ill set forth; and Ripley evidently had the
true experimental spirit, for he records his failures carefully. Of
less interest are the shorter pieces attributed to him besides the
Medulla Preface-his Vision in about a score of fairly regular
fourteeners, his Scroll, or the verses in it in irregular octo-
syllables, sometimes approaching 'Skeltonics,' and one or two
others in the same metre, extending instead of contracting itself.
Of Thomas Norton, who dates his own Ordinall of Alchemy
at 1477, a little more is known or supposed to be known.
Ashmole's statement that from the first word of his Proeme and
the Initial Letters of the six following chapters (discovered by
acromonosyllables and syllabic acrostics) we may collect the
author's name and place of residence,' which has sometimes been
quoted without the parenthesis, is thus misleading, for you must
take the first syllables, not the first letters, to make
Tomas Norton of Bristo.
And the identification of the master whom he tells us he sought
at the age of twenty-eight and from whom he learnt alchemy, is
conjectural, though it was, most probably, Ripley.
He is generally supposed to have been the son of a Norton
who was a very prominent citizen of Bristol, being bailiff in
1392, sheriff in 1410, mayor in 1413 and M. P. pretty continuously


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The Alchemists
213
from 1399 to 1421; while the alchemist himself is thought to
have sat for the city in 1436. Whether all these dates are not
rather far from 1477 is a point merely to be suggested.
The Ordinall is written in exceedingly irregular heroic
couplets, often shortening themselves to octosyllables,
He was, and what he knew of schoole
And therein he was but a fool,
and sometimes extending themselves or their constituent lines
after the fashion of
Physicians and Appoticaries faut (make mistakes in) appetite and will.
Indeed, if Ascham was really thinking of The Ordinall when,
in The Scholemaster, he ranks Th. Norton, of Bristow' with
Chaucer, Surrey, Wyatt and Phaer as having made the best
that could be made of the bad business of riming verse, it
merely shows how entirely insensible he was to true English
prosody. Still, Norton is not quite uninteresting, because he shows,
even more than Lydgate, how many hares at one time the versifiers
of this period were hunting when they seemed to be copying
Chaucer's couplet. Indeed, in some respects he is the earliest
writer to exhibit the blend of which Spenser nearly made a very
great success in the February of The Shepheards Calender, and,
in a less degree, in May and September—this blend, however,
being, in Norton's case, no doubt, not at all consciously aimed
at, but a mere succession of hits and misses at the couplet itself.
He sometimes achieves very passable Tusserian anapaestics,
Her name is Magnesia, few people her knowe,
She is found in high places as well as in low,
extending himself in the very next line almost to a complete
fourteener,
Plato knew her property and called her by her name,
and in a line or two contracting to
That is to say what this may be.
The matter is less clearly put than in Ripley; and, though
neither can be called a poet, the master is rather less far from
being one than the scholar. But Norton's greater discursiveness
may make his work more attractive to some readers, and the
story of Dalton and Delves in his second chapter reads like a
true anecdote.
Great as was the attraction of rime royal, it was not likely quite
p. 289, ed. W. Aldis Wright, Cambridge English Classics.
a
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214
The English Chaucerians
to oust the older favourite, the octosyllabic couplet, which, it has
to be remembered, could also boast the repeated, if not the final,
patronage of Chaucer, and that (which was almost as influential)
of Lydgate, while the third great influence, Gower, was wholly
for it. No practitioner of this time, however, attained the ease
and fluency of Confessio Amantis as a whole or came anywhere
near the occasional vigour of its best parts, while the slip-shod
insignificance of the measure at its worst found constant victims.
The so-called romance (really a didactic poem) of Boctus and
Sidrac by Hugh de Campden, who is supposed to represent
the first half of the century, may stand as a representative
of this, while the Legends of the Saints by Osbern Bokenam,
copied by, or for, a certain Thomas (not Benet) Burgh, in 1447,
are written entirely in Chaucerian decasyllabic verse, differently
arranged as regards line group, but fairly regular in the line itself
-much more so, indeed, than the average verse of the time. This
regularity, however, is compensated by an extraordinary failure to
attain even the slightest tincture of poetic style and sentiment.
Bokenam, a Suffolk man, and using some dialectal forms, was an
Augustinian friar. But there is little doubt that he must bave
been a pretty constant student of Chaucer himself, as we know he
was of his contemporary and countryman Lydgate.
Though there may seem to be 'nothing but low and little' in
this account of the known or, at least, named writers in southern
English verse during the fifteenth century, yet some satisfaction is,
no doubt, to be extracted by a true, and not impatient or ignorant,
lover of English poetry, in every part and period of its long and
important development. But there is probably no period in the
last seven hundred years which yields to such a lover so little
satisfaction as this. In comparison with it, the period preceding
Chaucer is a very ‘Paradise of Dainty Devices. ' It ought not to be
neglected, because it is necessary to the understanding of the
whole story, and is, perhaps, the most remarkable illustration in
that story of the French proverb about falling back to make a
better spring. But its attractions are almost wholly the attrac-
tions of instruction; and the instruction is seldom that which
the writers desired to give, pedagogic as they often were.
To the most attractive, if also the most puzzling, part
of it, we may now come. There can be no doubt that, putting
ballads, carols and the like aside, no verse in southern English,
from 1400 to 1500 or a little later, has anything like the
literary and poetical merit or interest which attaches to the


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The Chaucerian Apocrypha 215
best of the doubtful 'Chauceriana' themselves. These pieces have,
during the last generation, been rather unfortunate: for some
Chaucer-students, in their fear of seeing them readmitted to the
canon, have, as it were, cast them out altogether and refused to
have anything to do with them, while even those who have admitted
them to a sort of court of the gentiles have seemed afraid of
paying them too much attention. This seems irrational, and it is
certainly unlucky; for more than one or two of these pieces
possess poetical merit so considerable that their authors, when
discovered, will have to be put above any writer previously
mentioned in this chapter. The Plowman's Tale, which falls
quite out of Chaucerian possibility from its substance and temper,
has already been handled with its begetter the Vision, and
many of the smaller pieces are sufficiently disposed of with
Tyrwhitt's label of 'rubbish. But The Tale of Beryn or Second
Merchant's Tale, with the preliminary adventures of the Pardoner;
La Belle Dame sans Merci, ascribed to Sir Richard Ros; The
Cuckoo and the Nightingale, ascribed to Sir Thomas Clanvowe;
The Flower and the Leaf, The Assembly of Ladies and The
Court of Love are well entitled to notice here, and at least three
of them deserve the commendations suggested above, whosoever
wrote them and at whatsoever time between the possible limits of
c. 1390-C. 1550 they may have been written.
The professed sequels to The Canterbury Tales themselves are
shut off from the rest of the last group by a formal peculiarity,
the neglect of which, by those who composed them and those
who admitted them, is a curious indication of the uncritical
attitude of the time. All The Canterbury Tales proper are
written in very strict metre, regularly handled. The Merchant :
Prologue and Tale are in a peculiar doggerel, half-way between
the fourteeners or run-on ballad measure of Gamelyn, and the
much more doggerellised medium of the early interludes.