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Ballads of

places are incessantly enlivened by some stroke of picturesque description, some vivid piece of natural painting, some simple outburst of heroism, or some convincing touch of pathos. The most famous of these works, and among the oldest, are the ballads of The Battle of Otterburne, Chevy Chase, and The Death of Douglas, which all commemorate some battle, foray, or military exploit of the Border. The class to which these admirable specimens belong bears the evident mark, in its subjects and its pervading dialect, of a Northern, Scottish, or at least Border origin. It would, at the same time, be unjust not to mention that there exist large numbers of ballads, often of very high merit, which are distinctly of English-that is to say, South British, parentage. This class includes the immense cycle. of popular poems describing the adventures of the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood, and his merry men. Whether Robin Hood ever existed, or whether he was merely a popular myth, is a question beyond the utmost pains of research; but the numerous pieces dealing with his exploits form a very perfect and valuable repertory of national tradition and national traits of character, and Robin Hood himself becomes almost a type of the national spirit. For in these purely English ballads we trace the resistance of the oppressed yeoman class to the tyranny of Norman feudalism-the nation against the invader. Scott turned this point to admirable account in Ivanhoe, in the scenes of which Robin Hood, under the name of Locksley, is the hero. Such ballads are sure signs of the opposition of popular to exclusively aristocratic feeling. In them Signifi we see the germs of the democratic spirit: they the ballad. commemorate the hostility of the English people

Robin Hood.

cance of

against the Norman tyrant; and the bold, joyous, popular sentiment which prevails in them stands in acute contrast to the lofty, exclusive, and cultured tone of the Trouvére's legends.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

A.-MINOR POETS.

(1.) The Followers of Chaucer.

After the death of Gower the flickering light of allegorical and epic poetry went out, and only the ghosts of the real thing remained. Nevertheless, two poets demand mention who, close to one another in age, were in no sense great writers, but remained closely faithful to the Chaucerian traditions.

JOHN LYDGATE (circ. 1370-circ. 1451) was a native of Suffolk and a monk of Bury St. Edmunds. He travelled, probably in Italy, where he is said to have studied at Padua, and certainly in France; and was well acquainted with foreign litera

ture.

He was Prior of Hatfield Broad Oak from 1423 to about 1430, and, returning to Bury in 1434, spent his last years there. Most of his work was done as a commission from princes of the blood and great noblemen, who kept him hard at work; and most of it is translation or adaptation of foreign epics. The chief of these are The Troy Book, finished in 1420, and translated at Henry V's command from an Italian epic by Guido delle Colonne; The Story of Thebes, an abbreviation of Statius' Thebais; and a colossal translation, through a French medium, of Boccaccio's De Casibus Illustrium Virorum, which Lydgate called The Falls of Princes. This task was undertaken by order of the unfortunate Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester-who perished mysteriously at Lydgate's own town of Bury-and was finished in 1438. These epics, heroic and moral, with many other narrative works, belong to his maturity. Of his earlier works, which were all allegorical, the chief is The Temple of Glass, a legend in the common tortured vein of love-allegory. Gray had a very high opinion of Lydgate, and reckoned that "he came nearest to

Chaucer of any contemporary writer I am acquainted with. His choice of expression and the smoothness of his verse far surpass both Gower and Hoccleve. He wanted not art in raising the more tender emotions of the mind." This may be; but to prefer Lydgate to Gower and Hoccleve is merely to say that he is a shade less dull; and it must be confessed that these poets act, generally speaking, but as foils to the great genius of Chaucer. Lydgate's work is, of course, interesting to students of language and metre, but to the general reader its usual lack of originality and imagination is a serious drawback for which occasional touches of real poetical feeling hardly compensate.

THOMAS HOCCLEVE (1368 or 69circ. 1450) was, as his name shows, a native of Hockliffe in Bedfordshire, and from 1388 to 1425 was a clerk in the Privy Seal Office. He was a poor poet, but his income from his position probably made him independent of patronage, and his poems-La Male Regle (1406) and Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue (circ. 1421)-give us a very interesting glimpse of his personal life and habits. He wrote a rambling allegorical poem, De Regimine Principum (1411-12), to counsel the unstaid youth of Henry V. He knew Chaucer and professed himself his disciple in the art of metre; but this, it must be confessed, does not say much for Chaucer's teaching.

One point that should be noticed with regard to these soi-disant followers of Chaucer is that their atti tude differs entirely from his as regards their own times. Lydgate and Hoccleve mark no progress in English verse they are reactionaries. By nature they were both incapable of writing English as though it were their own language. Both monk and lawyer would have found themselves more at home in Latin or Norman-French. Lydgate's work

85

eventually resolved itself into trans- | century, when compared with Eng

lation. Hoccleve began his career
by adapting, without acknowledg-
ment, in his Epistle to Cupid (1402),
Christine de Pisan's L'Epitre au
Dieu d'Amours. Both, again, aban-
don the worldly-wise tone about
love and chivalry which Jehan de
Meung adopted in his part of the
Roman de la Rose, and go back, in
their allegories, to the stereotyped
notions of the feudal period, which,
in Chaucer's work, are conspicu-
And while
ous by their absence.
Chaucer had satirised the abuses of
the Church and magnified the virtues
of the Wycliffites, Lydgate and Hoc-
cleve show all that fervent orthodoxy
which returned with the accession of
A great
the House of Lancaster.
deal of this reactionary spirit may
be put down to the circumstances of
these poets; but the whole tone of
their work is a natural ultra-conserva-
tism. Their admiration of Chaucer
doubtless unfeigned; their
failure to imitate his methods arose
from their incapacity to comprehend
his spirit. Their position sufficiently
explains the deadness of English
literature in the fifteenth century.
Most of their successors in the epic
school were men like JOHN HARD-
YNG (1378-1465?), who wrote a
metrical Chronicle of England, com-
ing down to the reign of Edward IV
and dedicated to that king. The
poetry is wretched and deserves the
attention only of the antiquary. In
the allegorical school their chief suc-
cessor was Stephen Hawes, who has
been mentioned in the text.

was

No one

can say that his work is better than theirs; if he has more command of phrase, and if his art is less strained, he is at all events not a conspicuous step in the path of progress. The real awakening of the Renaissance came late to England. Chaucer was the false dawn before light.

(2.) Scottish Poetry.

While Chaucer's influence was thus represented, badly and inadequately, in England, Scottish poetry showed more signs of progress. We have spoken in the text of the brilliancy of Scottish verse in the fifteenth

lish, and of the chief poets of the
school.

His

The transference, if one may call it so, of the Chaucerian spirit to Scotland is no doubt explained by the historical fact of James I's long captivity in England. Its characteristics were vigorously maintained by Dunbar and Bishop Douglas. The dialect of Scottish poetry is, of course, local, and in fact the common patois of the North of England. SIR DAVID LYNDSAY (1490-1555), Lord Lyon King at Arms, who was an intimate friend of James V, is the poet who, in Scotland, marks the transition from medieval poetry to the poetry of the sixteenth century. Lyndsay was a pupil, like the other Scottish allegorists, of Chaucer. Like all the Chaucerian school, he shows a strong propensity for imitation of Boccaccio, and there is no trace in his work of that appreciation of form which, during his lifetime, Surrey and Wyatt were deriving from the study of Petrarch. work is still Gothic and angular, and this provoked Hallam's criticism that "in his ordinary versification he seems not to rise much above the prosaic and tedious rhymers of the But his poetry is fifteenth century." not ugly or even dull, like Lydgate's; it has its human interest. Lyndsay contributed by his poems, as well as by active support, to the Reformation in Scotland. His Dream (1528) and his Complaynt of the Papyngo (i.e. parrot-1530) are satires on Court life and bitter meditations on the state of his country; and there was no more powerful factor in the work of the Reformation in Scotland than his interlude of The Three Estates, which was probably first We come closer to acted in 1540. his theological position in The Tragedy of the Late Cardinal, a hostile elegy on Cardinal Beaton (1547), which, like Chaucer's Monk's Tale and Lydgate's interminable Falls of Princes, was inspired by Boccaccio's De Casibus. His last and longest poem is The Monarchy (1554), a far from lively dialogue between a courtier and Experience. Squire Meldrum (1550) is a spirited chivalrous

romance.

If, in the matter of form,

Lyndsay makes no decided advance, he is, of all Chaucer's school, intellectually the most forward, and we shall see how the grave and reverend authors of The Mirror for Magistrates used his work and ideas.

(3.) The Companions of Surrey
and Wyatt.

A note is necessary on the collection called Tottel's Miscellany, in which, it has been said, the poems of Wyatt and Surrey first appeared. In this, the first printed poetical miscellany in English, we find the influence, not of Chaucer, but of the Italian poets, the sonneteers and song-writers as distinct from the narrative and epic poets, and principally of the great fountain of Renaissance learning, Petrarch. This book, published in June 1557, is the first-born of the English Renaissance. Apart from Surrey and Wyatt, the names of the authors are left to conjecture. SIR FRANCIS BRYAN (d. 1550), the nephew of Lord Berners, the translator of Froissart, and GEORGE BOLEYN, VISCOUNT ROCHFORD, brother of Anne Boleyn, beheaded, two days before his sister, in 1536, are supposed to have had a share in it. More certainty is attached to the part taken by THOMAS LORD VAUX (1510-1556), Captain of the Isle of Jersey under Henry VIII. His lyric, "I lothe that I did love," was adapted by Shakespeare for the grave-digger's song in Hamlet, and some of his poems are printed in the collection called The Paradise of Dainty Devices (see p. 108). Puttenham, in his Art of Poesy, describes Lord Vaux as "a man of much facilitie in vulgar makings." The chief of the band, however, if we are to judge by the initials N. G. appended to several songs in the Miscellany, was NICHOLAS GRIMALD or GRIMOALD (1519-1562), a Huntingdonshire man, who was first at Christ's College, Cambridge, and afterwards, proceeding to his Master's degree at Oxford, became a senior student of Christ Church. As chaplain to Bishop Ridley, for whom he did some theological translation

work, he naturally fell into difficulties in Mary's reign, but is said to have recanted in prison. Grimald was primarily a classical scholar, and no doubt his classical essays and his translation of Cicero de Officiis (1553). dedicated to Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely, occupied most of his time. His poetical work is full of the classical spirit; it is learned and neat in phrase, and is written, for the most part, in heroic couplets.

at

We should not forget THOMAS TUSSER (1527-1580), although his work is not, strictly speaking, very memorable. He was born at Rivenhall in Essex, was educated Cambridge, and passed two years at Court under the patronage of William, Lord Paget. He afterwards settled as a farmer at Cattiwade in Suffolk, where he wrote his didactic poem, The Hundred Good Points of Husbandry (1557). He practised farming in other parts of the country, was a singing man in Norwich Cathedral, and died poor in London. His work, after going through four editions, was published in an enlarged form (1577), under the title of Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, united to as many of Good Huswifery. It is written in familiar verse, and is, says Warton, "valuable as a genuine picture of the agriculture, the rural arts, and the domestic economy and customs of our industrious ancestors." is scarcely valuable for any other reason.

It

B.-MINOR PROSE WRITERS.

If the gap in poetry after Chaucer's death is considerable, the history of prose after Wycliffe is even more desultory. Wycliffe's prose, it should not be forgotten, is by no means to be compared, for literary importance, with Chaucer's poetry: apart from its moral influence, its chief significance is its place in the formation of the vernacular. It is homely and direct-plain language for plain people: it has none of the art of prose-writing about it, and naturally the modern reader studies it with an interest which is almost entirely antiquarian and grammati

cal. Consequently, while its influence on the language is very great indeed, its influence on literature is small. The natural language of Wycliffe, as a Schoolman, was Latin; and the ecclesiastical writers of the Lancastrian period reverted to Latin as the language of the Church. Italian prose, which became, in the hands of Boccaccio, so delicate an instrument, and all through the fifteenth century went on increasing in power and subtle art, touched no responsive note in the England of Wycliffe's day. English prose, in short, during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is, wherever it occurs, an individual attempt, not to create a literary language, but to use the spoken vernacular for private purposes. The real impetus to prosewriting as an art was given by the Tudor translators of the classics and of the Italian novelists. It was the accumulated heap of translations, those fine sonorous pieces of work which showed how the Elizabethan mind could appropriate the rhythm and sound of the ancient authors, which prepared the way for the prose of Hooker and the three great Caroline masters, Milton, Browne, and Jeremy Taylor.

In the meantime we may select from the heterogeneous employers of spoken English, REGINALD PECOCK (1395?-1460?), Bishop of St. Asaph from 1444 to 1450, and of Chichester from 1450 to 1457. Although he wrote against the Lollards, his own theological views were very heterodox; he was obliged to recant, was deprived of his bishopric, and passed the rest of his life in prison at Thorney Abbey. His principal work, The Repressor of Over-much Blaming of the Clergy, was written in 1449 and published about 1455. There is an excellent edition of this book by Professor Churchill Babington (1863). With respect to its language, we may quote Marsh. "Although, in diction and arrangement of sentences, the Repressor is much in advance of the chronicles of Pecock's age, the grammar, both in accidence and syntax, is in many points nearly where Wycliffe had left it; and it is

of course in these respects considerably behind that of the contemporary poetical writers. Thus, while these latter authors, as well as some of earlier date, employ the objective plural pronoun them, and the plural possessive pronoun their, Pecock always writes hem for the personal, and her for the possessive pronoun. These pronominal forms soon fell into disuse, and they are hardly to be met with in any English writer of later date than Pecock. With respect to one of them, however-the objective hem for them—it may be remarked that it has not become obsolete in colloquial speech to the present day; for in such phrases as I saw 'em, I told 'em, and the like, the pronoun em (or 'em) is not, as is popularly supposed, a vulgar corruption of the full pronoun them, which alone is found in modern books, but it is the true AngloSaxon and old English objective plural, which, in our spoken dialect, has remained unchanged for a thousand years."

SIR THOMAS MALORY, who lived in the reign of Edward IV, is the exception who proves the general rule with regard to the prose of the late Plantagenet era. As a matter of fact, he is the first of the translators. His Morte Arthur, printed by Caxton in 1485, is a compilation and translation of the various legends which, during the Middle Ages, had sprung round the heroic name of King Arthur. The Britons who had fled before the Saxon invasions into Armorica, men like the historian Gildas, had taken with them the memory of the great king, and had built up round it the Arthurian cycle of epic traditions, which had found its way back into Britain and had proved so fruitful a mine for the Norman chroniclers to draw from. In the difficult task of welding this confused mass of myths together Malory proved himself a master. His story is, naturally enough, rambling and disconnected in detail, but its episodes hang together well enough to show that Malory had a considerable sense of form; and the general impression which it leaves is that of a chronicle with a logical

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