O mayster dere, and fadir reverent, O universal fadir in sciènce, Alas that thou thine excellent prudence In thy bed mortel mightest not bequethe! What eyled Death? Alas! why would he sle the? John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of Bury St. Edmunds, who flourished about 1425, was also an admirer and imitator of Chaucer. He was, as a writer, less gifted than voluminous; Ritson, in his "Bibliographia Poetica," has enumerated two hundred and fifty-one of his productions; and this list is known to be incomplete. No writer was ever more popular in his own day; but it was a popularity which could not last. His versification is rough and inharmonious, as unlike as possible to the musical movement of Chaucer; his stories are prolix and dull, and his wit seldom very pointed. Instead of, like Chaucer, filling his ear, and feeding his imagination with the poetry of Italy, the only country where literature had as yet emerged from barbarism, and assumed forms comparable to those of antiquity, Lydgate's attention seems seems to have been engrossed partly by the inane Latin literature 1 of the period, partly by the works of the romance-writers and Trouvères, whose French was at that time a barbarous dialect, and whose rhythm was nearly as bad as his own. A selection from his minor poems was edited by Mr. Halliwell for the Percy Society in 1840. His longer works are, "The Storie of Thebes," translated from Statius; "The Falls of Princes" (translated from a French paraphrase of Boccaccio's work "De Casibus "); and “The History of the Siege of Troy." This last, a free version of Guido Colonna's Latin prose 1 This expression refers to the miscellaneous literature, not, of course, to the theological or philosophical works written in Latin. history, was undertaken at the command of Henry V. in 1412, and finished in 1420. "The Falls of Princes " are described by himself as a series of "Tragedies." All these three works are in the heroic rhyming measure. Lydgate also translated from the French "The Daunce of Machabre," or Dance of Death," in a curious octave stanza, of which the following is a specimen: "Owt of the Ffranche I drew it of entent Not word by word, but following the substance, And fro Parys to Englonde it sente, Only of purposs yow to do plesaunce; Rude of langage, — I was not borne in Ffraunce- Off here tunge I have no suffisaunce Her corious metres in Englisshe to translate." In this poem Death accosts first the pope, then the emperor, then the representatives of every earthly profession and calling in succession. Each of these replies in his turn; and all, with more or less of moralizing, own the levelling hand and irresistible might of Death. A poem called "Chichevache and Bycorne" has also been ascribed to him; he is the author, moreover, of a didactic poem in octosyllabics, of immense length, and never printed, to which a commentator of the sixteenth century has given the title "Reson and Sensuallyte;" its subject is the rivalry between reason and sense. Among the minor poets of this period, there is none so well deserving of notice as Lawrence Minot, whose poems were accidentally discovered by Mr. Tyrrhwitt among the Cottonian MSS. in the British Museum, near the close of the last century. They celebrate the martial exploits of Edward III., from the battle of Halidon Hill in 1333, to the taking of Guisnes Castle in 1352, and would seem to have been composed contemporaneously with the events described. They are in the same stanza of six short lines, common among the romancers, in which Chaucer's "Rime of Sir Thopas" is written. Nothing is known of Minot's personal history. Scottish Poets: Barbour, James I., Wynton. John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, is the author of an heroic poem entitled "The Bruce,"1 containing the history of Robert Bruce, the victor of Bannockburn, and of Scotland, so far as that was influenced by him. The poem is believed to have been completed in the year 1375. It is in the eight-syllable rhyming measure, and consists of between twelve and thirteen thousand lines. James I. of Scotland, who received his education while retained as a captive in England between the years 1405 and 1420, wrote his principal work, "The King's Quhair" (i.e., quire, or book), in praise of the lady who had won his heart, and whom he afterwards married, -the Lady Jane Beaufort, daughter of the Duke of Somerset. This poem, which is in a hundred and ninety-seven stanzas, divided into six cantos, contains much interesting matter of the autobiographical sort. Andrew Wynton, author of "The Originale Cronykil," was a canon of St. Andrew's, and prior of St. Serf's, the monastery on the island in Loch Leven. His "Cronykil" begins, as was then thought decorous and fitting, with the creation, plunges into the history of the angels, discusses general geography, and at the end of five books filled with this "pantographical" rubbish, as Dr. Irving amusingly calls it, settles down upon its proper subject, which is, the history of Scotland from the earliest ages down to his own time. He died about the year 1420. He incorporates freely the work of preceding writers, three hundred lines from Barbour, and no less than thirty-six chapters by some versifier whose name, he says, he has not been able to discover. His verse is, like Barbour's, octosyllabic; it is naïve, sense-full, and, in parts, touching.2 1 Irving's History of Scottish Poetry. 99 Prose Writers: Maundevile, Chaucer, Wyclif. The earliest known work in English prose of a secular character, "The Travels of Sir John Maundevile,' dates from this period. As before mentioned, the book had been originally written in French, and afterwards translated into Latin. It was probably about the year 1360 that Sir John prepared and published an English version, also for the benefit of his own countrymen. This is a proof that about this time the knowledge of French, even among the educated classes, was ceasing to be essential or universal. The author professes not only to have traversed the Holy Land in several directions, but to have visited many countries farther east, including even India; but, when we come to the chapters which treat of these countries, we find them filled with preposterous stories, which Maundevile, whose capacity of swallowing was unlimited, must have derived either from hearsay or from the works of travellers equally gullible with himself. When one reflects that Maundevile had as great opportunities as Herodotus, and then observes the use that he made of them, comparisons are forced on the mind not over-favorable to the English and mediæval, as contrasted with the Greek and classical, grade of intelligence. Our author tells of the "Land of Amazoym," an island inhabited only by a race of warlike women; of rocks of adamant in the Indian seas, which draw to them with irresistible force any ships sailing past that have any iron bolts or nails in them; of a tribe of people with hoofs like horses; of people with eight toes; of dwarfs; and of a one-legged race, whose one foot was so large that they used it to shade themselves from the sun with. The language, as used by Maundevile, appears almost precisely similar to that of Chaucer in his prose works. As a physician, Maunde vile belonged to a class of men not usually addicted to superstition, or overburdened with religious veneration; a trait which Chaucer, with his profound knowledge of mankind, hits off in his account of the "Doctor of Phisike: "His studie was but litel on the Bible." But the superstitious credulity of Maundevile is unbounded; nor did it tend to make his work unpopular. On the contrary, there is scarcely any old English book of which the manuscript copies are so numerous; and it is certain that it was held in high estimation all through the fifteenth century, - down, in fact, to the time when, foreign travel having become more common, the existence of the eight-toed men, &c., began to be doubted. Chaucer's prose works consist of two of the "Canterbury Tales," "The Tale of Melibæus," and "The Parson's Tale," a translation of Boethius' " De Consolatione Philosophiæ," the "Astrolabie," and "The Testament of Love." "The Tale of Melibæus," the design of which is to enforce the duty of forgiveness of injuries, is one of those which are supposed to be told by the poet himself. "The Parson's Tale" is a treatise on the sacrament of penance. Both of these are written in fluent, intelligible English, and present few other difficulties to the reader but those which the old orthography occasions. In translating Boethius, Chaucer was renewing for the men of his own day the service rendered by Alfred to his West Saxon countrymen. "The Testament of Love" is divided into three parts. It professes to be an imitation of the work of Boethius. In the first part, Love bequeathes instructions to her followers, whereby they may rightly judge of the causes of cross fortune, &c. In the second, "she teacheth the |