1. CHAPTER V. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. ROM the death of Chaucer in 1400, down to the birth of Edmund Spenser in 1552,-that is, for a century and a half,—there is no man of genius in England to carry on the work of original thought either in prose or in verse. The greatest names in verse are James I. of Scotland, William Dunbar, Gawaine Douglas, and Sir David Lyndesay; John Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey. The greatest names in prose are William Caxton, Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, and William Tyndale. But, though there were few great writers, there were many great events; and the greatest of these were the Introduction of Printing into England, and, greatest of all, what is called the Revival of Learning. The first printing press was erected in the Sanctuary, Westminster, by Caxton in the year 1474. The revival of learning is closely connected with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, and the consequent emigration of the learned Greeks who resided there. Constantinople was taken in 1453, and a large number of Greek scholars settled in Italy, with their libraries of manuscripts. Up to that time, the Greek language and literature were unknown in the West of Europe; and even great universities like Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, had no teacher or professor of Greek. The two men who most ardently promoted learning in Italy in the fifteenth century were Pope Nicholas V. and Cosmo de Medici, the ruler of Florence. Grocyn was the first man who taught Greek in England; and he lectured in Balliol College, Oxford. 2. There are two disciples of Chaucer who probably deserve to be mentioned here, and these are Thomas Occleve and John Lydgate. THOMAS OCCLEVE was born in the year 1370, and was the friend and disciple of Chaucer. He is said to have been a very dull writer ; and it is quite unnecessary to quote from him. JOHN LYDGATE, a monk of Bury St. Edmunds, commonly known as Dan John of Bury, was born in 1370 and died in 1440. He was a very prolific and fluent writer, and could produce rhymes to order in any number. His writings are not without spirit, but they need only be mentioned in a survey of English literature. He added the Story of Thebes to the Canterbury Tales; but it is not now included in that collection. 3. JAMES THE FIRST, of Scotland, the best poet of the fifteenth century, was born in 1394 and died in 1437. In 1405, when only eleven years old, he was taken prisoner by the English, while on his way to France to be educated. Henry IV. and his successors detained him a prisoner for nineteen years; and most of his time was spent in Windsor Castle. One day, looking out of the Round Tower, in which he was confined, he saw walking in the garden a beautiful lady— Jane Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and therefore granddaughter of John of Gaunt and Catherine Swynford, the sister-in-law of Chaucer. He fell in love with her, and married her in 1424. His poem of the King's Quhair (Quire, or Book) has her for its subject. It was written in the nineteenth and last year of his captivity in England. It uses the seven line stanza which Chaucer has employed in the Man of Lawes Tale and other poems. This stanza is commonly called the rhyme royal, and is believed to have received this name from its employment by James. The following stanzas show that his verses are as accurate and regular as Chaucer's, while, perhaps, his style is clearer : Now there was made, fast by the tourës wall, A garden fair, and in the corners set Was all the place, and hawthorn hedges knet, 1 Herber, arbour. 2 Knet, knit. From the same root comes knot. 4 Forby, past. So thick the bewës1 and the leaves green, The sharpë, greenë, swetë juniper, Growing so fair with branches here and there, The bewes spread the herber all about. Note.-Guest states in his English Rhythms, p. 639 (ed. Skeat), that "the epithet royal seems to be derived from the chant-royal of the French, a short poem in ballet-stave, written in honour of God and the Virgin Mary; and by which, according to French critics, the abilities of the king were tested in the poetical contests at Rouen.' 4. WILLIAM CAXTON was born in the Weald of Kent in the year 1422. He was a merchant and citizen of London, and when past middle age had occasion to pay frequent visits to the Low Countries, a general name for what is now called Belgium. When in Germany he became acquainted with the new art of printing, and quickly noticed its capacity for reproducing books much more rapidly and cheaply than the manuscripts of the day could be brought out. He seems to have set up his first printing press in Bruges in 1468, and to have removed to Cologne in 1471. But it was not till thirty years after the Germans had discovered the art of printing (that is, of using movable types),—it was not until the year 1474, that the first printed book appeared in England. This was "The Game and Playe of the Chesse," وف which was "finished the last day of March, 1474." His press was situated in the Almonry, near Westminster Abbey. "The predominant spirit of the age was still a mixture of devotion and romance; and the books printed by Caxton were chiefly story books and religious books. But he also printed the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. Between 1471 and 1491 he printed more than sixty-three books. Most of them were translations from French or from Latin; and many of these were executed by himself. He also brought out in 1482 a new edition, "modernised," or rewritten by himself, of Trevisa's translation of the Polychro 1 Bewes, boughs. The endings w, gh, and y may, any one of them, stand for an old hard g. 2 Middës, in the middle of. 3 Life, living person. 4 The word weald is a Southern form of wold, which is a Northern form of the Midland word wood. The tendency of an l to vanish, first to the ear, and then to the eye, is seen in would and in such (=solich). nicon of Higden. And it is a fact worthy of special notice— that between 1350 and 1485 the English language had changed so much that the old version of John de Trevisa was almost unintelligible. A parallel case would be, if the poems of Pope could not be understood by educated readers of the present day. In fact, the vocabulary of the English language was changing; it was becoming extremely Latinised, and the genuine English words of Trevisa were falling into forgetfulness. Mr. Marsh mentions that Caxton's Game of the Chesse, contains three times as many French words as the Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. Although Caxton was about fifty when he began to be a printer, he translated or wrote matter sufficient to fill twenty-five octavo volumes. 5. SIR THOMAS MALORY'S Morte d'Arthur is the collection of stories out of which Tennyson has drawn the incidents for his Idylls of the King. "It treteth," Caxton says, "of the byrth, lyf, and actes of the sayd Kynge Arthur, of hys noble Knyghtes of the Rounde Table, their marvayllous enquestes and aventures."1 Another interesting production of the fifteenth century is the Paston Letters. They are the correspondence of a knightly family from the reign of Henry VI. to Henry VII., and cover the space between 1422 and 1505. The style of the correspondents-all educated persons-is singularly modern; and they are full of valuable details regarding the domestic manners and ways of thinking and living in the fifteenth century. 6. The poems of WYATT and SURREY mark a new epoch in English poetical literature. Their studies in Dante, Petrarch, and other Italian poets, induced in them a greater correctness, smoothness, polish, and precision of form; and they had the merit of introducing new metres into the English language. These two may fairly be regarded as the forerunners of the great Elizabethan age. SIR THOMAS WYATT was born in 1503, and died in 1542. He was chiefly engaged in diplomacy; and he died of a fever at Sherborne. He is the more vigorous writer of the two. HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY, was born in 1517, and was executed by Henry VIII., in 1547. His ostensible crime was the blazoning of the royal arms along with his own; but he is believed to have been engaged in a conspiracy 1 The best edition is published by Macmillan & Co. |