Remember you wele, how that ye dele
For if ye, as ye said

Be so unkynde to leave behinde

Your love the Nut Brown Mayd
Trust me truly, that I shall die

Soon after ye be gone;

For in my minde, of all mankinde
I love but you alone."

He: "My own deare love, I see thee prove
That ye be kynde and true:

Of mayd and wife, in all my life
The best that ever I knewe

Be merry and glad; be no more sad
The case is chaunged newe

For it were ruthe, that for your truthe
Ye should have cause to rue;
Be not dismayed, whatever I said
To you when I began;

I will not to the grenewode go
I am no banished man."

And she, with delight and fear-
"These tidings be more glad to me
Than to be made a quene;

If I were sure they shold endure
But it is often seene

When men wyl break promise, they speak

The wordes on the splene:

Ye shape some wyle, me to beguile

And stele from me I wene;

Then were the case, worse than it was
And I more woebegone,

For in my minde, of all mankynde

I love but you alone."

Then he at last,

"Ye shall not nede, further to drede
I will not disparage

You (God defend!) syth ye descend
Of so grate a lineage;

Now understand-to Westmoreland
Which is mine heritage

I wyl you bring, and with a ryng
By way of marriage

I wyl you take, and lady make

As shortely as I can:

Thus have you won an Erly's son
And not a banished man."

In our next chapter we shall enter upon a different century, and encounter a different people. We shall find a statelier king, whose name is more familiar to you: In place of the fat knight and Prince Hal, we shall meet brilliant churchmen and hard-headed reformers; and in place of Otterbourne and its balladry, we shall see the smoke of Smithfield fires, and listen to the psalmody of Sternhold.

W

CHAPTER V

HEN we turned the leaf upon the Balladry of England, we were upon fifteenth century ground, which, you will remember, we found very barren of great writers. Gower and Froissart, whom we touched upon, slipped off the stage just as the century began-their names making two of those joined in that group of deaths to which I called attention, and which marked the meeting of two centuries. Next we had glimpse of Lydgate and of King James (of Scotland), who, at their best, only gave faint token of the poetic spirit which illuminated the far better verses of Chaucer.

We then passed over the period of the Henrys, and of the War of the Roses, with mention of Shakespeare's Falstaff-of his Prince Hal-his Agincourt-his courtship of Katharine of Valois-his inadequate presentment of the Maid of Orleans-his crabbed and crooked Richard III.-all rounded out with

the battle of Bosworth field, and the coming to power of Henry of Richmond.

We found the book-trade taking on a new phase with Caxton's press: we gave a tinkling bit of Skelton's "Merry Margaret;" we put a woman-writer-Dame Juliana Barnes-for the first time on our list; we lingered over the quaint time-stained Paston Letters, which smelled so strongly of old English home-life; and we summed up our talk with a little buglenote of that Balladry which made fitful snatches of music all through the weariness of those hundred years.

EARLY DAYS OF HENRY VIII

TO-DAY we front the sixteenth century. Great names and great deeds crop out over it as thickly as leaves grow in summer. At the very outset, three powerful monarchs came almost abreast upon the scene-Henry VIII. of England, Francis I. of France, and Charles V. of Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries.

Before the first quarter of the century had passed, the monk Luther had pasted his ticket upon the doors of the church at Wittemberg; and that other soldier-monk, Loyola, was astir

with the beginnings of Jesuitism. America had been planted; the Cape of Good Hope was no longer the outpost of stormy wastes of water with no shores beyond. St. Peter's church was a-building across the Tiber, and that brilliant, courteous, vicious, learned Leo X. was lording it in Rome. The Moors and their Saracen faith had been driven out of the pleasant countries that are watered by the Guadalquivir. Titian was alive and working; and so was Michael Angelo and Raphael, in the great art-centres of Italy: and Venice was in this time so rich, so grand, so beautiful, so abounding in princely houses, in pictures, in books, in learning, and in all social splendors, that to pass two winters in the City of the Lagoon, was equal to the half of a polite education; and I suppose that a Florentine or Venetian or Roman of that day, thought of a pilgrimage to the far-away, murky London, as Parisians think now of going to Chicago, or Omaha, or San Francisco-excellent places, with delightful people in them; but not the centres about which the literary and art world goes spinning, as a wheel goes spinning on its hub.

We have in the contemporary notes of a well-known Venetian chronicler, Marini