5.  The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.  Edited by Richard Morris.  London:  Bell & Daldy (6 volumes.)

CHAPTER II.

FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER.

1400-1599.

The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history.  It was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer’s death before any poet came whose name can be written in the same line with his.  He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them.  The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, remains his own secret.  Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as the Court of Love, the Flower and the Leaf, the Cuckow and the Nightingale, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers.  If not Chaucer’s, they are of Chaucer’s school, and the first two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces, such as the Boke of the Duchesse and the Parlament of Foules.

Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his Governail of Princes, a didactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS. a colored portrait of his “maister dere and fader reverent.”

  This londes verray tresour and richesse
  Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable
  Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse
  Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse
  Of Rhetoryk.

Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the Story of Thebes, as an addition to the Canterbury Tales.  His ballad of London Lyckpenny, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the law courts at Westminster in search of justice—­

  But for lack of mony I could not spede—­

is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.

Chaucer’s influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of state.  There he wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, entitled the King’s Quhair (King’s Book), in Chaucer’s seven-lined stanza, which had been employed by Lydgate in his Falls of Princes (from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called the “rime royal,” from its use by King James.  The King’s Quhair tells how the poet, on a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with

  The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper.