magnificent festival. This palace, like a Norman fortress or feudal castle, is guarded with barbicans, portcullises, chains and fosses. Adrastus wishes to close his old age in the repose of rural diversions, of hawking and hunting."*

2. Lydgate is justly charged with diffuseness. He accumulates, to wearisomeness, both thoughts and words. But he has an earnestness which often rises into enthusiasm, and which gives a very impressive air to the religious pieces that make up a majority of his minor poems. Although his originality of invention is small, he sometimes works up borrowed ideas into exceedingly striking combinations. His descriptions of scenery are often excellent.

Some of his smaller compositions illustrate, very instructively, both the literary and the theological character of his time. The survey which we have now nearly completed of the literature of the middle ages, has furnished frequent examples of a fact learned by us in the commencement of our present studies; namely, that almost all the literary productions of those times fall into groups, each of them designed and fitted only for a limited audience. Neither comprehensive observation of society at large, nor a wish to instruct or please a wide and diversified circle of readers, has shown itself in any of the periods we have examined, till we reached the time of Chaucer. He, indeed, was truly a national poet; the shrewd observer of all facts which were poetically available, the active and enlightened teacher of all classes of men who were susceptible of literary instruction. In passing from his works to those of Lydgate, we feel as if we were turning aside from the open highway into the dark and echoing cloisters. The monk of Bury is thoroughly the monk: he is guided by the monastic spirit, and has the monastic blindness to every thing that happens beyond the convent gate. He, an ecclesiastic living in the generation after Wycliffe, is as strongly imbued with superstitious belief and priestly prejudice, as if he had just returned from the crusades, or had sat at the feet of Saint Dominic. If he was Chaucer's pupil in manner and style, his masters in opinion and sentiment were the compilers of the "Gesta Romanorum."

By marking carefully, and familiarizing to ourselves by one or two examples, some of the characteristics of Lydgate, the best and most popular of our English poets in the fifteenth century, we shall be prepared to hail with more lively satisfaction those great revolutions which, some generations afterwards, impressed a new and purer stamp alike on the literature and on the religion of the

nation.

* Warton: History of English Poetry.

Dan John, like his fellow-monks of earlier times, is fond of satire, and sometimes not unsuccessful in it. In his "London Lickpenny" he scourges all persons engaged in active business, particularly the lawyers, a class of men towards whom the clergy entertained a heavy grudge, for having gradually wrested from them their old monopoly of public employment. In other pieces he repeats, with great zest, the threadbare jokes on the vices and frailties of the female sex. Several hymns and other devotional pieces are very fine, both in feeling and in diction. A few stories, borrowed from the Latin collections, the French fabliaux, and unknown authorities, are used for inculcating precepts moral and religious, and for enforcing the duties of the laity to the Church. One of the apologues we shall use in part, by and by, as a specimen of the English written in his day. Some of the others are instances of the superstitious tendency lately alluded to; while they are told with a solemn awfulness of tone, which, notwithstanding the frequent intrusion of fantastic levity, gives them no small poetical merit.

One of these recommends the duty of praying for the dead. Wulfric, a priest in Wiltshire, had "a great devotion" for chanting requiems. He died about midnight; and, soon afterwards, a brother-priest went into the church to chant the first service of the day. He sees, rising from the graves in the pavement, figures like children, clad in white: they are departed souls for whom Wulfric has said mass, and who, after prayer for his repose, return into their sepulchres. This short story is well told by the poet. There is yet greater force, with a singularly striking air of ghostly wildness, in a much longer piece, a legend of Saint Augustin, the apostle of the Saxons in England. Students in foreign literature will be interested in observing that, in the seventeenth century, the Spanish poet Calderon founded one of his most famous dramas on a similar story. The poem begins with a tedious history of tithes from Melchisedec downwards, summed up with a warning which the tale is intended to make more emphatic. Visiting a village called Compton, Austin endeavours in vain to make the lord of the manor abandon a resolution he had long acted on, of refusing to pay tithe. The saint, on beginning to say mass in the church, sternly commands that every man who is not in a state of grace shall depart from the holy place. Suddenly a tomb is rent asunder; and there issues from it a terrific figure, which crosses the churchyard and stands trembling at the gate. But the bold priest continues the service amidst universal consternation. At its close he questions the spectre, who tells him that he had formerly been lord of the ma

nor, had refused to pay tithes, and had died excommunicated Austin asks him to point out the grave of the priest who had ex communicated him; and, this being done, he summons the dead priest to arise and absolve the repentant sinner. The second ghost appears, and obeys the order; and the first one quietly goes to his rest. The living lord of the manor, of course, offers instant payment; and then, abandoning all his possessions, he follows the saint in his mission through the land. Meanwhile, the resuscitated priest is disposed of, in some very impressive stanzas, after a fashion which the poet himself justly calls strange. Austin, by virtue of his miraculous powers, gives him his choice of returning to his grave, or of accompanying him in his preaching of the gospel. The dead man, after moralizing on the miseries of life, prefers to die again; and the saint approves his resolution.

3. Stephen Hawes, writing in the reign of Henry the Seventh, might be referred either to the fifteenth century or the next. He is remembered as the author of "The Pastime of Pleasure," a long allegorical poem, in the same taste as the Romance of the Rose. It is whimsical and tedious, but graced, in its personifications, with much more of invention than any other English work near its time; and it exhibits the language as having now assumed, in all essentials, the form in which it was used by the great poets of the Elizabethan age. The prince Graunde Amour, or Great Love, relates in it the history of his own life and death. Inspired, by the report of Fame, with affection for La Bel Pucell, (the Fair Maiden,) he is required to make himself worthy of her, by accepting instruction in the Tower of Doctrine. He is there received and taught by the Lady Grammar, and by her sisters Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, and Music; the poet kindly allowing the reader to partake fully in the lessons. Music introduces him to La Bel Pucell, from whom he is then separated, to learn yet more in the Tower of Geometry; and he has afterwards to visit the Tower of Chivalry, and there to be made a knight. He thence goes out on adventures, worships in the temples of Venus and Pallas, is deceived by the dwarf False Report, and kills a giant who has three heads, entitled Imagination, Falsehood, and Perjury. Afterwards he is married to his lady, and lives happily with her; till he is made prisoner by Age, who gives him Policy and Avarice for companions. At length he is slain by Death, buried by Dame Mercy, and has hi epitaph engraved by Remembrance.

The emblematical incidents and characters which have thus been sketched, recall to us the allegorical school of poetry which

was so widely spread throughout the middle ages, and in which Chaucer did not disdain to study. The recollection of them, again, will be useful, when, in becoming acquainted with the Elizabethan masterpieces, we shall see the same turn of thought prevailing in Spenser's immortal Faerie Queene.

4. In quitting this period, we bid adieu to the Metrical Romances. The introduction of these into our tongue had begun, as we have learned, in the latter half of the thirteenth century; and they continued to be composed frequently until about the middle of the fifteenth. They were, to the last, almost always translations or imitations; but some of the later specimens both show much improvement in literary art, and embrace an increasing variety of topics. The chivalrous stories next began to be usually related in Prose. The most famous of the romances in this shape is also one of the best specimens of our old language, and, with hardly an exception, the most delightful of all repositories of romantic fictions. It is the "Mort Arthur," in which, in the reign of Edward the Fourth, Sir Thomas Mallory, a priest, probably using French compilations in prose, combined into one narrative the leading adventures of the Round Table.

As the Romances ceased to be produced, the Ballads may be said to have gradually taken their place. Indeed, many of these are just fragments of the metrical romances; and many others are abridgments of them. Our oldest ballad poetry arose, perhaps, out of attempts to communicate to a popular audience, possessed of little leisure and less patience, the same kind of amusement and excitement which the recital of the romances had been designed to produce among the nobles.

The best of our extant ballads, both Scottish and English, belong, with few exceptions, to the time of Mary Queen of Scots and her English kinswoman and jailer. But the latter half of the fifteenth century appears to have been very fertile both in minstrels and in minstrelsy.

All of us know the famous old chant of which Sir Philip Sidney said, that he could not hear it without feeling himself roused as if by the blast of a trumpet. 'Chevy Chase seems to be the most ancient of those ballads that has been preserved. It may possibly have been written while Henry the Sixth was on the throne. The style is often fiery, like the old war-songs, and much above the feeble, though natural and touching, manner of the later ballads. One of the most remarkable circumstances about this celebrated lay is, that it relates a totally fictitious event with all historical particularity, and with real names.

Hence it was probably not composed while many remembered the days of Henry the Fourth, when the story is supposed to have occurred.""

The distinguished critic whose words have just been quoted, is unhesitatingly of opinion that the Scottish ballads are much superior to the English: and it is also allowed, universally, that those which were produced in the border counties of both king doms have much greater poetic merit, both through their spirited energy, and through the imaginative use they make of local superstitions, than such as had their birth in the more southerly provinces.

Of the latter, indeed, the only very interesting examples are those which celebrate the deeds of Robin Hood, and which, though the incidents are placed in the midland counties, are in many points curiously like the border-minstrelsy. The gentle and generous robber of Sherwood Forest is a personage probably as unreal as the hunting of the Percy in the wilds of Cheviot Fell. There is very little substance in the theory which would make him to have been a Saxon, manfully resisting the Norman oppressors. Yet the idea which this hypothesis involves, is not uninstructive. Both in old histories, and in a curious Latin biography lately discovered, we are made acquainted with the adventures of a real hero, Hereward of Brunne in Licolnshire. This popular chief, leading a band of Saxons into the marshes of Ely, thence made for years destructive forays on the possessions of the Normans, and at length forced William the Conqueror to a treaty; perishing, however, afterwards by treachery or in a domestic broil. We know, too, that similar rebellions were not infrequent for more generations than one. Many exploits of the leaders were doubtless preserved traditionally by the conquered race, and were at hand to be woven into any stories that might be founded on the deeds of other champions. But, further, even when the national hatred for the Normans had died away, hatred of the nobility was kept up by the tyrannical forest laws. It is as a champion of the commonalty against these, that Robin Hood is distinctively presented to us: and the sense of wrong which they had awakened in the breasts of the peasantry could not be embodied more forcibly, than in the affectionate flattery with which the minstrels beautify his character.

5. During this unhappy age, the spirit of metaphysical speculation, and the zeal for classical learning, had alike died away. We might suppose erudition to have been really extinct, were it

* Hallam: Introduction to the Literature of Europe.