Persistence of French in John Gower. traditions never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer's artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like a child's sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise. "The Canterbury Tales" had shown of what high uses the English language was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, wrote his "Vox Clamantis" in Latin, his "Speculum Meditantis" (a lost poem) and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his "Confessio Amantis" (1393) in English. The last named is a very uninspired work, in some fifteen thousand smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which the lover is shriven by Genius, the Priest of Nature, who discourses on the five senses and the seven deadly sins, and tells a string of stories taken from Ovid, the "Gesta Romanorum," and other sources. 1. BERNHARD TEN BRINK: "Early English Literature.' Translated from the German by H. M. Kennedy. New York: 1883. 2. MORRIS AND SKEAT: "Specimens of Early English." (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford. 3. "The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman." Edited by W. W. Skeat. Oxford: 1886. 4. CHAUCER: "The Prologue"; "The Knightes Tale"; "The Nonne Preestes Tale." Edited by A. Morris. Oxford: 1867. 5. Edited by Rev. W. CHAPTER II. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599. THE fifteenth century was a barren period in English literary history. It was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet came whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them. The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as "The Court of Love," "The Flower and the Leaf," "The Cuckow and the Nightingale," are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces, such as "The Boke of the Duchesse" and "The Parlament of Foules." Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his "Governail of Princes," a didactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his manuscript, a colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent," This londës verray tresour and richesse. The school of Occleve's "Governail of Princes." Another versifier of this same generation was John John Lydgate. Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very prolix writer, who composed, among other things, "The Story of Thebes," as an addition to "The Canterbury Tales." His ballad of "London Lyckpenny," recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the law courts at Westminster in search of justice James I. of "The Kinges Quhair." But for lack of mony I could not spede is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life. Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of state. There he wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, entitled "The Kinges Quhair" (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, which had been employed by Lydgate in his "Falls of Princes" (from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called the "rime royal," from its use by King James. "The Kinges Quhair" tells how the poet on a May morning looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with The sharpë, greenë, sweetë juniper. He was listening to "the little sweetë nightingale," when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once his "heart became her thrall." The incident is precisely like Palamon's first sight of Emily in Chaucer's "Knightes Tale," and almost in the very words of Palamon the poet addresses his lady: Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creatúre Or heavenly thing in likeness of natúre ? That have depainted with your heavenly hand Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of Venus, Minerva, and Fortune, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging to Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings to his window a spray of red gilliflowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in golden letters, with a message of encouragement. James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate as his mas ters. His education was English, and so was the dialect A royal poet. of his poem, although the unique manuscript of it is in the Scotch spelling. "The Kinges Quhair" is somewhat overladen with ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece to Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from captivity and became queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The story of the murder has been told by D. G. Rossetti in his ballad, "The King's Tragedy." The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very spirit of romance. The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of literary style and to confirm the authority of Maintenance of a literary standard. Slow development of English prose. the East-Midland English in which he had written. In the history of every literature the development of ! |