PREFACE

TO THE

EDITION OF MDCCXCV.

THE neglect which writers of genius are occasionally condemned to experience, as well from their contemporaries as from posterity, was never exemplified, perhaps, in a more eminent degree than by the poet whose works are now offered to the public. His very name appears totally unknown to Leland, Bale, Pitts, and Tanner: it is mentioned, in short, by no one writer, till late in the present century, nor is found to occur in any catalogue: while the silence of the public records would induce us to believe that the great

monarch whom he has so eloquently and earnestly panegyrised was either ignorant of his existence or insensible of his merit.*

That these equally elegant and spirited compositions were at length retrieved from the obscurity in which they had been for ages interred, was owing to a whimsical circumstance, which it may not be impertinent to relate. The compiler of the Catalogue of Cottonian Manuscripts, printed at Oxford in 1696, or some person whom he employed, had contented himself with describing the inestimable volume, marked GALBA E. IX. which contains some of the most precious relics of ancient English poetry, in these words: "CHAUCER. Exemplar emendate scriptum." The manuscript, it must be confessed, is very fairly, and also pretty correctly written, if either be the

* Of this monarch, who gave to Chaucer an office in the customs, upou condition that he wrote his accounts with his own hand, it has already been observed, that, " though adorned with many royal and heroic virtues," he "had not the gift of discerning and patronizing a great poet." Vide Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, by Tyrwhitt, 1775, svo. vol. i. p. xxviii.

meaning of emendate, but owes not the smallest obligation to the great poet whose genuine works 'might, naturally enough, have been expected to occupy the whole. The indolence of the catalogue-maker being equal to his ignorance, readily converted the name of RICHARD CHAWFER, scrawled, perhaps, by some former proprietor of the volume, on a spare leaf, into that of GEOFFREY CHAUCER, the supposed author of its contents. To this fortunate blunder, however-if a blunder there was to be—we are indebted for our acquaintance with the name and writings of LAURENCE MINOT, whom one of a different nature might have consigned to perpetual oblivion. The late ingenious and industrious Mr. Tyrwhitt, in preparing materials for his admirable edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, consulted the manuscript for the purpose of collating an accurate copy of his favourite author. His disappointment, which may be easily imagined, would be very speedily converted into the most agreeable sur

prise, on finding himself thus unexpectedly introduced to the acquaintance of a new poet, anterior, perhaps, to that favourite in point of time, and certainly not his inferior with respect to language. In consequence of this happy discovery, the name of LAURENCE MINOT, which he himself has luckily taken care to preserve, was first ushered into the modern world by a note to the learned "Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer."

A copy of these poems having been communicated to the Rev. Thomas Warton, of Oxford, some extracts from them appeared, with sufficient aukwardness indeed, in the third volume of his History of English Poetry, published in 1781. Those extracts, however, are by no means undistinguished by the general inaccuracy which pervades that interesting and important work. Its author, confident in great and splendid abilities, would seem to have disdained the too servile task of cultivating the acquaintance of ancient dialect

or phraseology, and to have contented himself with publishing, and occasionally attempting to explain, what, it must be evident, he did not himself understand. That an English writer of the first eminence should never have heard of the name of BALIOL, must excite surprise and yet this appears to have been the case of our poetical historian, who, in his certainly bold, but not less erroneous, attempts to elucidate one of the following poems, makes " Edward THE BALIOLFE" to mean "Edward THE WARLIKE," that is, "Edward THE THIRD," who "is introduced," he says, "by Minot, as resisting the Scotish invasion in 1347 [1346] at Nevil's Cross, near Durham;" though every child might be ex

* The is well known to be the northern corruption of de hence the Bruce, the Baliol, of the Scotish poets. See Barbour's Life of Bruce, passim. Thus, also, Philippe de Valois is here called "Philip the Valas." The name of Baliol was frequently written Bailolf, or Bailliof, in the age of our poet. In Mores's Nomina Nobilium Equitumque sub Edw. I. 1749, 4to. we find "sir Thomas de Bailolf," and in a list of Durham knights, in the time of Henry III. preserved in an ancient manuscript, called The Boldon-buke, from its containing a copy of that record, in the auditor's office, Durham,