But at the very time this Lydgate was writing, a tenderer and sweeter voice was warbling music out of a prison window at Windsor; and the music has come down to us: *

"Beauty enough to make a world to doat,
And when she walkèd had a little thraw
Under the sweet grene bowis bent,

Her fair freshe face, as white as any snaw
She turned has, and forth her way is went;
But then begun my achès and torment
To see her part, and follow I na might;
Methought the day was turned into night."

There is a royal touch in that, and it comes from a royal hand - that of Prince James of Scotland, who, taken prisoner by Henry IV., was held fast for sixteen years in the keep of Windsor Castle. Mr.

cites London Lickpenny — copying from the Harleian MS. (367) in the British Museum.

* James I. (of Scotland), b. 1394 and was murdered 1437. The King's Quair, from which quotation is made, was written in 1423. It is a poem of nearly 1400 lines, of which only one MS. exists—in the Bodleian Library.

An edition by Chalmers (1824) embodies many errors: the only trustworthy reading is that edited by the Rev. Walter Skeat for the Scottish Text Soc. (1883-4). A certain modernizing belongs of course to the citation I make – as well as to many others I have made and shall make.

Irving has made him the subject of a very pleasant paper in the Sketch-book. Though a prince, he was a poet by nature, and from the window of his prison did see the fair lady whose graces were garnered in the verse I have cited; and oddly enough, he did come to marry the subject of this very poem (who was related to the royal house of England, being grand-daughter of John of Gaunt) and thereafter did come to be King of Scotland and — what was a commoner fate- to be assassinated. That queen of his, of whom the wooing had been so romantic and left its record in the King's Quair made a tender and devoted wife threw herself at last between him and the assassins - receiving grievous wounds thereby, but all vainly - and the poor poet-king was murdered in her presence at Perth, in the year 1437.

These three poets I have named all plumed their wings to make that great flight by which Chaucer had swept into the Empyrean of Song: but not one of them was equal to it: nor, thenceforward all down through the century, did any man sing as Chaucer had sung. There were poetasters; there were rhyming chroniclers; and toward the end of

the century there appeared a poet of more pretension, but with few of the graces we find in the author of the Canterbury Tales.

John Skelton * was his name: he too a priest living in Norfolk. His rhymes, as he tells us himself, were "ragged and jagged:" but worse than this, they were often ribald and rabid — attacking with fierceness Cardinal Wolsey-attacking his fellowpriests too so that he was compelled to leave his living: but he somehow won a place afterward in the royal household as tutor; and even the great Erasmus (who had come over from the Low Countries, and was one while teaching Greek at Cambridge) congratulates some prince of the royal family upon the great advantage they have in the services of such a "special light and ornament of British literature." He is capricious, homely, never weak, often coarse, always quaint. From out his curious trick-track of verse, I pluck this little musical canzonet:

"Merry Margaret

As midsummer flower;

:

*Priest at Diss in Norfolk, b. (about) 1460; d. 1529. Best

edition of works edited by Rev. A. Dyce. 1843.

Gentle as falcon

Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness

Much mirth and no madness,

All good and no badness,

So joyously,

So maidenly,

So womanly

Her demeaning
In everything

Far, far passing

That I can indite

Or suffice to write

Of merry Margaret

As midsummer flower

Gentle as falcon

Or hawk of the tower:

Stedfast of thought

Well-made well-wrought;

Far may be sought

Ere you can find

So courteous so kind

As merry Margaret

This midsummer flower."

There is a pretty poetic perfume in this a merry

musical jingle; but it gives no echo even of the tendernesses which wrapped all round and round the story of the Sad Griselda.

wel

Henry V. and War Times.

This fifteenth century—in no chink of which, as would seem, could any brave or sweet English poem find root-hold, was not a bald one in British annals. There were great men of war in it: Henry V. and Bedford and Warwick and Talbot and Richard III. all wrote bloody legends with their swords across French plains, or across English meadows.

Normandy, which had slipped out of British hands as you remember under King John, was

won again by the masterly blows Henry V. struck at Agincourt and otherwheres. Shakespeare has given an historic picture of this campaign, which will be apt to outlive any contemporary chronicle. Falstaff disappears from sight, and his old crony the dissolute Prince Hal comes upon the scene as the conquering and steady-going King.

Through all the drama from the "proud hoofs

دو

* Bedford (when Regent of France) is supposed to have transported to England the famous Louvre Library of Charles V. (of France). There were 910 vols., according to the catalogue drawn up by Gilles Mallet "the greater number written on fine vellum and magnificently bound."