He was listening to “the little sweete nightingale,” when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once his “heart became her thrall.”  The incident is precisely like Palamon’s first sight of Emily in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and almost in the very words of Palamon the poet addresses his lady: 

  Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature
  Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature? 
  Or are ye very Nature, the goddess,
  That have depainted with your heavenly hand
  This garden full of flowres as they stand?

Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of Venus, Minerva, and Fortune, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging to Love’s service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings to his window a spray of red gilly flowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in golden letters, with a message of encouragement.

James I. may be reckoned among the English poets.  He mentions Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate as his masters.  His education was English, and so was the dialect of his poem, although the unique MS. of it is in the Scotch spelling.  The King’s Quhair is somewhat overladen with ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser.  The lady who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece to Henry IV.  She was married to her poet after his release from captivity and became queen of Scotland in 1424.  Twelve years later James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins.  The story of the murder has been told of late by D.G.  Rossetti, in his ballad, The King’s Tragedy.  The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very spirit of romance.

The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland English in which he had written.  Though the poets of the 15th century were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model to follow.  As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be translated from the French, homilies and saints’ legends and rhyming chronicles were still manufactured.  But the poems of Occleve and Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to prolong the Chaucerian tradition.  The literary English never again slipped back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer.