Imagery and imagination are not required in the school of society. Occleve seems, however, sometimes to have told a tale not amiss, for WILLIAM BROWN, the pastoral bard, inserted entire a long story by old Occleve in his "Shepherd's Pipe." To us he remains sufficiently uncouth. The language had not at this period acquired even a syntax, though with all its rudeness it was neither wanting in energy nor copiousness, from that adoption of the French, the Provençal, and the Italian, with which Chaucer had enriched his vein. The present writer seems to have had some notions of the critical art, for he requests the learned tutor of Prince Edward, afterwards Edward the Fourth, to warn him, when,—

and when

"Metring amiss;"

"He speaks unsyttingly,"

"Or not by just peys† my sentence weigh,
And not to the order of enditing obey,
And my colours set ofté sythe awry."

We might be curious to learn, with all these notions of the suitable, the weighty, the order of enditing, and the colours often awry, whether these versifiers had really any settled principles of criticism. Occleve is a vernacular writer, bare of ornament. He has told us that he knew little of "Latin nor French," though often counselled by his immortal master. His enthusiastic love thus exults :

"Thou wer't acquainted with Chaucer?-Pardie!
God save his soul!

The first finder of our faire langage !"

There is one little circumstance more which connects the humble name of this versifier with that of Chaucer. His affectionate devotion to the great poet has been recorded by Speght in his edition of Chaucer. "Thomas Occleve, for the love he bare to his master, caused his picture to be truly drawn in his book De Regimine Principis, dedicated to Henry the Fifth." In this manuscript, with "fond idolatry,” he placed the portraiture of his master facing an invocation. From this portrait the head on the poet's monument was taken, as well as all our prints. It bears a faithful resem

* Unfittingly.

† Weight; probably from the French poids.

blance to the picture of Chaucer painted on board in the Bodleian Library. Had Occleve, with his feelings, sent us down some memorials of the poet and the man, we should have conned his verse in better humour; but the history of genius had not yet entered even into the minds of its most zealous votaries.*

:

LYDGATE; THE MONK OF BURY.

LYDGATE, the monk of Bury, was also the scholar of Chaucer our monk had not passed a whole sequestered life in his Benedictine monastery; he had journeyed through France and Italy, and was familiar with the writings of Dante and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and of Alain Chartier. The delectable catalogue of his writings, great and small, exceeds two hundred and fifty, and may not yet be complete, for they lie scattered in their manuscript state. A great multitude of writings, the incessant movements of a single mind, will at first convey to us a sense of magnitude; and in this magnitude if we observe the greatest possible diversity of parts, and, if we may use the term, the flashings of the most changeable contrasts, we must place such a universal talent among the phenomena of literature.

LYDGATE composed epics, which were the lasting favourites of two whole centuries-so long were classical repetitions of Troy" and of "Thebes" not found irksome.

66

In his

A single trait, however, has come down to us from that other scholar of Chaucer, whom we are next to follow. Lydgate assures us, from what he heard, that the great poet would not suffer petty criticisms "to perturb his reste." He did not like to groan over, and "pinch at every blot," but always "did his best."

"My master Chaucer that founde ful many spot,
Hym lyste not gruche, nor pynch at every blot;
Nor move himself to perturb his reste;

I have perde tolde, but seyd alway his beste."

Lydgate's Troy.

The Troy Tale" was composed at the command of the King, Henry the Fifth; as "the Fall of Princes," from Boccace, was at the desire of Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester. He wrote regal poems for kings, while he dispersed wisdom and merriment for¡their subjects.

graver hours, he instructed the world by ethical descants, Æsopian fables, and quaint proverbs; fixed their wonder by saintly legends and veracious chronicles; and disported in amorous ditties, and many a merrie tale: translating or inventing, labour or levity, rounded the unconscious day of the versifying monk. " We descend from the Siege of Troy," a romance of nearly thirty thousand lines, which long graced the oriel window, to the freer vein of humour of "London Lick-penny," which opens the street-scenery of London in the fourteenth century, and "the Prioresse and her three Wooers," that exquisitely ludicrous narrative ballad for the people.*

Ritson, whose rabid hostility to the clerical character was part of his constitutional malady, whether it related to "a mendacious prelate," or "a stinking monk," after having expended twenty pages in the mere enumeration of the titles of Lydgate's writings, heartlessly hints at the "cart-loads of rubbish of a voluminous poetaster; a prosaic and drivelling monk." And this is greedily seized on by the hand of the bibliographer. Percy, and Ellis too, mention DAN LYDGATE with contempt. Critics often find it convenient to resemble dogs by barking one after the other, without any other cause than the first bark of a brother, who had only bayed the moon. It now seemed concluded that the rhyming monk was to be dismissed for ever. A very credible witness, however, at last deposed that "Lydgate has been oftener abused than read." And now, Mr. Hallam tell us that " GRAY, no light authority, speaks more favourably of Lydgate than either Warton or Ellis," and this nervous writer, with his accustomed correct discernment, has alleged a valid reason why Gray excelled them in this criticism; for "great poets have

* While this volume is passing through the press, "A Selection from the Minor Poems of Lydgate" has been edited by Mr. Halliwell. The versatility of Lydgate's poetical skill is advantageously shown in his comic satire, and his ethics drawn from a deep insight into human nature. The Editor suggests a new reading for the title of the ballad of "London Lick-penny," more suitable to the misadventures of its hero,-"London Lack-penny;" for London could not lick a penny from the forlorn hero who had not one to offer to it. GROSE, probably taken by the humorous designation, has placed it among his local proverbs.

The tale of the Prioress and her three Wooers is one of the happiest fabliaux. Mr. Campbell transcribed "the merrie tale" for his Specimens, when he discovered that a preceding forager had anticipated him in Mr. Jamieson, who has preserved it in his "Popular Ballads," i. 253.

Turner's Hist. of England, v.

often the taste to discern, and the candour to acknowledge, those beauties which are latent amidst the tedious dulness of their humbler brethren."

Warton has, however, afforded three copious chapters on Lydgate, which are half as much as his enthusiasm bestowed on Chaucer. A Gothic monk, composing ancient romances, was a subject too congenial to have been neglected by the historian of our poetry, and he has limned and illuminated the feudal priest, with the love of the votary, who deemed, in his "lone-hours,"

"Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with flowers."

"He was not only

His miniature is exquisitely touched. the poet of his monastery, but of the world in general. If a disguising was intended by the company of Goldsmiths; a mask before his majesty; a way-game for the sheriffs and aldermen of London; a mumming before the lord mayor; a procession of pageants for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a carol for the coronation; Lydgate was consulted, and gave the poetry.

Mr. HALLAM objects that "the attention fails in the schoolboy stories of Thebes and Troy-but it seems probable that Lydgate would have been a better poet in satire upon his own times, or delineation of their manners; themes which would have gratified us much more than the fate of princes."

This is relatively true; true as regards some of us, but not at all as respects Lydgate, nor the people of his age, nor the king and the princes who commanded themes congenial with their military character, and their simple tastes, romantically charming the readers of two centuries. If our critic, in the exercise of his energetic faculties, lives out of the necromancy of the old Romaunt, afar from Thebes and Troy, Thomas Warton was cradled among the children of fancy, and in his rovings had tasted their wild honey. The only

I may point out the raw material which our poetical antiquary has here worked up with such perfect effect in this picturesque enumeration. Appended to Speght's Chaucer, that editor furnished a very curious list of about a hundred works by Lydgate, which were in his own possession. Most of the singular poetical exhibitions here enumerated are mentioned towards the end of that list, and which Warton has happily appropriated, and so turned a dry catalogue into a poetical picture.

works of Lydgate which attracted his attention, were precisely these tedious "Fate of Princes" and "the Troy Book."

The other modern critics, Ritson, Percy, and Ellis, had but a slight knowledge of DAN* LYDGATE. They have generally acted on the pressure of the moment, to get up a hasty court of Pie-poudre-that fugitive tribunal held at fairs—to determine on the case of a culprit even before they could shake the dust off their feet. But time calls for an arrest of hasty judgments, or brings forward some illustrious advocate to reverse the judicial decision, or set forth the misfortunes of the accused. Two, most eminent in genius, stand by the side of the monk of Bury, COLERIDGE and GRAY. Coleridge has left us his protest in favour of Lydgate, for he deeply regrets that in the general collection of our poets, the unpoetic editor "had not substituted the whole of Lydgate's works from the manuscript extant, for the almost worthless Gower."+ Gray alone has taken an enlarged view of the state of our poetry and our language at this period. When that master-spirit abandoned the history of our poetry from his fastidious delicacy or from his learned indolence, because Warton had projected it, English literature sustained an irreparable loss. In Gray surely we have lost a literary historian, such as the world has not yet had; so rare is that genius who happily combines qualities apparently incompatible. In his superior learning, his subtle taste, his deeper thought, and his more vigorous sense, we should have found the elements of a more philosophical criticism, with a more searching and comprehensive intellect, than can be awarded to our old favourite THOMAS WARTON. In the neglected quartos of GRAY we discover that the poet had set earnestly to work on

*

DAN, as Ritson tells us, is a title given to the individuals of certain religious orders, from the barbarous Latin Domnus, a variation of Dominus, or the French Dam or Dom. Dan became a corruption of Don for Dominus. The title afterwards extended to persons of respectable condition, as vague as our complimentary esquire. It was applied to Chaucer by Spenser, and when obsolete it became jocular; for we have "Dan Cupid." Prior renewed it with ludicrous gravity when telling a tale which he had from "Dan Pope." It is still used in an honourable sense by the Spaniards in their DoN.

Literary Remains, ii. 130.

The great poet has left two or three most precious fragments; but these have long been buried in those ill-fated quartos, consisting chiefly of notes on Greek and on Plato, which Matthias published with extraordinary pomp; and, so he used to say, as a monument for himself as well as the bard-a monument which, his egregious self-complacency lived to witness, partook more of the properties of a tombstone than the glory of a column.