After Chaucer and Gower, English poets wandered back into the wilderness. They are most valuable to students of the development of the language, they were popular in their own time and for more than a century later. Specialists find in them some literary merits, oases in the sandy desert, but it would be false to say that they are generally entertaining and attractive.

John Lydgate, the Monk of St. Edmundsbury, would have obliged us had he written prose Memoirs of his own life, for he came in contact with some very interesting persons, and knew London and Paris as well as his cloister. Born (1370) at Lydgate near Newmarket (where good drink was hardly to be come at, he tells us), he was, before the age of 15, received into the great Edmondsbury monastery school, where he was a reluctant pupil, and, later, a not very willing monk. He proceeded to Oxford, it is thought to Gloucester Hall, now Worcester College, and, by 1397, was a priest in full orders. He speaks of Chaucer as his Master; but probably he means his master in the spirit: probably he never sat at the feet of the great poet.

In 1423 Lydgate was made prior of Hatfield Broadoak. In 1426 he was in Paris, and, by order of the Earl of Warwick, the cruel jailer of Jeanne d\'Arc, he translated a French poetical pedigree by Laurence Callot, a French clerk in English service. Laurence is notorious for having called the Bishop of Beauvais a traitor, when he accepted the abjuration of Jeanne d\'Arc (May, 1431), and for being very busy in the tumult which then arose. Lydgate returned to his cloister at Bury in 1434, and we last hear of him, in connexion with a pension which he held, in 1446.

The dates of his poems are not certainly known, as a rule.[Pg 111] "The Flower of Curtesie," "The Black Knight," and "The Temple of Glass," may be between 1400 and 1403. The "Troy Book," made from Dares, Dictys, Beno?t de Sainte-Maure, and, mainly Guido de Colonna, is of monstrous length, and is dated 1412-1420. This poem has some fine passages in which Lydgate, for example, when describing the penitence of Helen, seems to be translating the actual words of the Iliad. The "Story of Thebes" followed (1420), then came "The Falls of Princes," and a translation of Deguileville\'s "Pilgrimage of Human Life," made for the Earl of Salisbury. "The Legend of St. Edmund" was written for the devout Henry VI; the date of "Reason and Sensuality" is earlier (1406-1408).

About forty works are attributed to Lydgate, all, or almost all, being marked by "his curious flatness". His lines have, for the ordinary mind, the unpleasant peculiarity that you may read many of them several times before you discover, if you ever do, how he meant them to be scanned. It is not to be found out when he meant the final e to be sounded, and when he did not. His poems may have been badly copied, or badly printed, or both, but the bewildering result remains. When we add that Lydgate is usually a translator, and is always a copyist of all the old formul? of spring and dreams, and that he is as prolix as an Indian epic, it must be plain that he cannot be said to hold a high place in living literature. "The Book of the Duchess," a thing of Chaucer\'s immaturity, is not one that a young poet of the next generation would sedulously ape, yet Lydgate imitated it in "The Black Knight".

The best-known piece of Lydgate is a short satiric poem, "London Lickpenny," describing the misadventures of a poor countryman who finds that in London he can get nothing, neither law, nor food, nor any other commodity—for nothing. His hood is stolen in the crowd.

Occleve.

Occleve is not merely a less voluminous Lydgate. He is a character, or assumes to be a character not unlike the French poet, Francois Villon, but with little of Villon\'s genius. Occleve[Pg 112] was born about 1368; about 1387 he got a little post in the Office of the Privy Seal; in 1406, in a poem "La Male Règle," he petitions for payment of a pension: he has wasted his youth, his health is lost, and no wonder,

But twenty wintir passed continuelly
Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf with me.

The great number of public-houses excite people to drink,

So often that man can nat wel seyn nay.

He would have drunk harder if there had been more money in his pouch: had Occleve been a richer man there would be less of the rhymes of Occleve. He liked the society of gay girls, which is expensive,

To suffre hem paie h............