rather than imperil the safety of a poor laundress in his train. No act on record of any knight of romance can exceed that it is as incomparable a proof of his tenderness as the combat with two hundred is of his courage and strength. The enthusiastic Pinkerton preferred Barbour, "taking the total merits of the work together, . . . to the melancholy sublimity of Dante, and the amorous quaintness of Petrarca;" and every Scotchman whose patriotism would be above suspicion must wish that he could agree with Pinkerton. There is, indeed, a certain epic swing and momentum about the romance of the Bruce; its vigorous opening picture of the prostration of Scotland under the English, and its passionate aspiration after freedom, place a powerful arrest on the wandering attention, and summon us with no small cogency to hear the story of enfranchisement through its ups and downs of hope and danger to the triumphant end. If he had stopped with the battle of Bannockburn, Barbour's Bruce might have been called a historical epic, bearing to the epic proper the same relation that the chronicle history bears to the regular drama. But by carrying his story on to the death of Bruce, he conforms it to the laws of the metrical romance, which, doubtless, were the laws that he set himself to observe, and very likely the only laws known to him. The manners and sentiments, as we have seen, are those of chivalry. Barbour was a distinct observer, and he had the consistent, pure, defined sentiments of a clearheaded man, careful always to establish a harmony between the sentiment and the object. There is not much embellishment in his style. He presents us with but few studies of natural scenery, and those bare and meagre; and he draws no extended portraits of the beautiful women that moved among and commanded the homage of his brave His diction rises considerably above the rude doggerel of rhyming chronicles; he is superior to the necessities of make-rhymes. Undoubtedly, however, the main charm of Barbour's Bruce lies in the cordial energy of its battles and rencounters. 2. HENRY THE MINSTREL, "Blind Harry," the champion of the fame of William Wallace, was born at least half a century later than Barbour. One does not like to say severe things about a poor old wandering minstrel. Like many other bygones that were interesting to bygones, he and his heroic verse, once an acceptable arrival at many a lively feast and proud residence, would be considered a terrible visitation in modern society. Blind Harry has not the elements of perennial interest. Only strong patriotism could have composed, and only strong patriotism could have listened to, his strains. Till very recently, however, he was popular among the Scottish peasantry, circulating no longer in oral recitation, but in printed copies, often boardless and well-thumbed. Of late he has been superseded by Miss Porter's 'Scottish Chiefs.' III. ENGLISH SUCCESSORS. It does no great violence to fact to treat all the English poets of the fifteenth century as the disciples of Chaucer. Almost everything of value in the poetry of that centuryand not much has been preserved, if there was much to preserve was due to the impulse given by Chaucer. A great deal of versification went on out of the reach of that impulse, in the shape of chronicles, lives of saints, translations from the French, and other miscellaneous lines. Prose romances also were translated. But the two or three poets that rise above the herd had, or professed to have, an acquaintance with Chaucer, and acknowledged allegiance to him, though all of them were far from catching any tincture of the charm of his verse. It is, indeed, significant of the general dulness of ear, as well as poverty of execution, that Skelton places Gower and Lydgate on the same level with the master from whose greatness to their littleness is such a fathomless sheer descent. 1 I remember, however, a sturdy beggar of the name of Wallace, who was much revered by schoolboys as a lineal descendant from the national hero, and who used to recite from "Blind Harry" violent incidents, such as the breaking of the churl's back, with appropriate gesticulation. I. THOMAS OCCLEVE. (1370-1430 ?) Of the immediate successors of Chaucer, the most celebrated is Lydgate; but Occleve, or Hoccleve, comes first in order of time. It is to Occleve that we owe our standard portrait of Chaucer. He was a most ardent and admiring disciple of the great poet, and more than once lamented him in such strains as these, extolling his knowledge in rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry, and inveighing against the indiscriminate ravages of death "O master dear and father reverent, My master Chaucer, flower of eloquence, O universal father in science, Alas, that thou thine excellent prudence In thy bed mortal mightest not bequeathë! What ailed Death, alas! why would he slee thee? O Death, thou didest not harm singular In slaughter of him, but all this land it smarteth! His name to slay: his high virtue astarteth And again "She might have tarried her vengeance a while And her officë needës do mote she; God bade her do so, I trust for the best. O master, master, God thy soulë rest!" In Thynne's edition of Chaucer, in 1532, there was printed, among other miscellaneous pieces, a "Letter of Cupid," written in 1402. No other production ascribed to Occleve appeared in print for more than two hundred years; and after Warton characterised him as a feeble poet of cold genius, the very titles of whose poems were chilling to the searchers after invention and fancy, the unfortunate poet ran a considerable risk of extinction. In 1796, however, George Mason printed various poems from an MS. that Warton had not seen, and pleaded for a more favourable verdict. Occleve is certainly an interesting character, if not an interesting poet. "Cold" was a singularly inappropriate word to apply to him. He seems to have been a fellow of infinite warmth and geniality. He is supposed to have been born in 1370, and he emerges at the Court of Richard II. in 1387. The luxurious extravagance of that Court found in him a congenial spirit. He could never pass the sign of Bacchus, with its invitation to thirsty passengers to moisten their clay, so long, at least, as he had anything in his purse; and he spent much money in the temples of a goddess of still more questionable character. He was a favourite among cooks and taverners, from the circumstance that he always paid them what they asked. Only two men of his acquaintance could equal him in drinking at night and lying in bed in the morning. The only thing that preserved his life from the brawls incident to such habits was an invincible cowardice: he never traduced men except in a whisper. All this we know from his own humorous confessions. He tells us also that his excesses exhausted his money, although he held a valuable office, and impaired his health, though nature had given him a strong constitution. He would seem to have received a pension of twenty marks a-year from Henry IV., and various begging poetical addresses are extant to show that he suffered from a chronic scarcity of coin. In the introduction to his poem De Regimine Principum ("On the Government of Princes," written in 1411 or 1412), he relates his distressed circumstances, and how an old man had advised him to write a work and dedicate it to Prince Henry, who might perhaps be induced thereby at least to see that his annuity was regularly paid. There would seem to have been not a little of Falstaff in his character. He addressed a poem to Sir John Oldcastle, full of grave disputation, which re ceives a somewhat mock-serious air from his advice to the good knight to leave off studying Holy Writ, and read 'Lancelot of the Lake,' or 'Vegetius,' or 'The Siege of Troy,' confining his Bible reading, if he must read the Bible, to Judges, Kings, Joshua, Judith, the Chronicles, and the Maccabees, all of which are most authentic and pertinent to chivalry. Although he had been appointed a writer to the Privy Seal, probably in 1387,1 his hopes were long set on obtaining a benefice in the Church, but at last he married in despair. In the beginning of the reign of Henry VI., he wrote an appeal for pecuniary help to Carpenter, afterwards Bishop of Worcester; and unless his conduct was more respectable in his later years, when seventy winters had passed over his head, this petition must be taken as being very much of a piece with Falstaff's application for a loan to the Lord Chief-Justice. His last patron seems to have been the Duke of York; and he lived to the good old age of eighty, having contrived probably to pass through life very easily, from his success in conciliating patronage, and in borrowing without repaying. The "Letter of Cupid " is full of sly humour and tender feeling. It is addressed by Cupid to all his subjects, to warn them of the grievous complaints that have been made to him by ladies of honour and reverence concerning the deceitful outrages and offences done them by men. complain particularly of the little island of Albion, "Passing all landës, on the little isle That cleped is Albion they must complain. They 1 This date should probably be 1387, the date also of Occleve's coming to Court. In his "Address to Health," Occleve speaks of twenty years of misspent life; in his De Regimine Principum, he speaks of having been a writer to the Privy Seal for "twenty year and four come Easter." The date of the one poem is supposed to be 1406, and of the other 1412; but the circumstances make 1407 and 1411 equally probable; and if we accept these dates with an interval of four years between the two compositions, it becomes likely that Occleve's memory went back to the same date as the beginning of his dissipation and his official appointment. The date of the appointment is usually given as 1392, from a curious mistake of "twenty years and four" for twenty. |