Makend many a wofull mone. Let take anone this Constantin, In which the good and her infere1 But he, which alle thing may shilde, And happeth thannë that she driveth He badde anon men shulden go To se, what it betoken may. This was upon a somer day, The ship was loked, and she founde. Elda within a litel stounde It wist, and with his wife anon Where that they foundë gret richesse together. 2 taken in hand. 8 Constance was found. Out of the ship with great worship As they that weren of her glade. But sorweth sore of that she fonde But elles she hath all her will, And thus with hem she dwelleth still. Dame Hermegild, which was the wife Spekend all day betwene hem two, Upon a day that, faste by, In presence of her husbonde, Wher they go walkend on the stronde, Upon this worde her herte aflighte', ▲ creed. ⚫ felt afflicted. • petition, Concludeth him by such a way, A morwe tok his way and rood, LYDGATE. [JOHN LYDGATE was born at the village of Lydgate near Newmarket in Suffolk, about 1370. His death probably occurred about 1440. Appar ently the latest date discoverable in any of his poems is 1433, in which year he wrote a sort of city poem,' celebrating the pageants, processions, and other rejoicings in the city of London on the occasion of the solemn entry of Henry VI. He was a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds. Among his numerous writings three stand out prominently: the Storie of Thebes, written when he was nearly fifty; the Troye Book, begun under Henry IV, and finished about 1420; and the Falls of Princes, written between 1422 and 1433.] Lydgate seems to have been stimulated to write partly by the example and renown of Chaucer, partly by a predilection for the French poets of that day-Christine de Pisan, Machault, Granson, &c. and the desire to emulate them. He was a monk of that monastery of St. Edmund king and martyr, at Bury, into the interior life of which Jocelyn de Brakelonde, much helped by his modern editor', has enabled us to look so clearly. But Abbot Hubert and Abbot Samson had laboured and gone to their account more than two centuries before, and though his rule remained the same, the conditions of life were much changed in the interval, even for a monk of Bury. In particular, the dazzling and distracıing images of Literature besieged his cell, and haunted his thoughts, with a persistency unknown at the earlier period. Then the vernacular literatures were in their infancy, and sober Latin was the ordinary dress of a cultivated man's thought; now, in France and Italy, and in England, numerous works, bearing the imprint of the newest spirit of the day, decked also with sallies of wit and beautiful imagery which came directly from the heart and brain, through the familiar mother-tongue, were circulating amongst and influencing all who could think and feel. Lydgate, who by his Mr. Carlyle, in Part II of his Past and Present. own account had little vocation for the cloister, whose boyhood had been mischievous', his youth lazy and riotous, and his early manhood disedifying, for a long time cared little about St. Edmund and the special duties of the monastic life. He had an intense admiration for Chaucer, and his first large work seems to have heen The Storie of Thebes, which he represents as a new Canterbury tale, told by himself soon after his joining the company of pilgrims at Canterbury. It is founded on the Thebaid of Statius and the Teseide of Boccaccio, and written in the ten-syllable rhyming couplet which Chaucer had used with such effect in The Knightes Tale. The prologue is spirited, but when the body of the poem is reached the attention soon flags. Chaucer versifies with facility, and also with power; Lydgate has the facility without the power. His next considerable work, on the story of Troy, was undertaken about A.D. 1412, at the request of Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V., and finished in 1420. The prince desired that the noble storye' of Troye should be as well known in England as elsewhere, and as well written in English As in the Latyn and the Frenshe it is.' Troy was then regarded as the 'antiqua mater' of every European nation. It would therefore seem very fitting, that since Wace and his English translators, following Geoffrey of Monmouth, had given in the vernacular the story of the original Trojan settlement of England under Brutus the great-grandson of Aeneas, the moving vicissitudes of the city to which Brutus and Aeneas belonged should also now be told in English. This poem is in five books, and written, like The Storie of Thebes, in the ten-syllable couplet. It is founded on the Latin prose history of Troy by Guido di Colonna, a Sicilian jurist of the thirteenth century. The austere old layman To my bettre did no reverence, Of my sovereyns gafe no fors at al, My Pater-noster, my crede, or my beleeve, Cast at the cok; loo! this was my manere.' Of religioun I weryd a blak habite, Oonly outward as by apparence.' Lydgate's Testament, among his Minor Poems, edited by Mr. Halliwell. |