CHAPTER III.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY: POETS.

1. Intellectual Character of the Fifteenth Century.-2. Development of the English Language and of English Style; Reserved Energies.-3. John Lydgate.— 4. Thomas Occleve.-5. James I. of Scotland.-6. Minor Poets.-7. Ballads.

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1. It is usual for literary historians to speak of the fifteenth century as a dismal one in the annals of English letters, epoch of intellectual relapse and of literary barrenness. Even beyond the borders of England there was, during this period, a dearth of important literary works: according to Hallam, no great literary masterpiece was produced in the fifteenth century anywhere in Europe. Certainly, in England, during all that time, there was no literary genius of the highest order, such as the fourteenth century had in Chaucer, such as the sixteenth century had in Spenser and in Shakespeare.

In studying the English literature of the fifteenth century, it will be best for us, first, to group together the principal facts in the outward and inward life of that century, that helped or hindered the progress of literature.

(a) It was in England a century of turbulence; of popular convulsion; of bloody strife between rival families of the royalty and nobility. Not a king sat on the throne whose right to sit there was not in dispute. It was the century of the insurrection of Jack Cade, and the Wars of the Roses.

(b) The claim of the King of England to the crown of France kept both countries, during the first half of the century, in a state of constant war, or of the expectation of war.

(c) Greater restraints were put upon the action of the human mind than had ever before been done in England. In 1401 an English statute was confirmed, by which it was settled that every sheriff in taking the oath of his office must swear to redress all errors and heresies; and also that heretics might be

dealt with at their own discretion, provided always that the proceedings against any heretic should be publicly and judicially ended within three months. In that very year, William Sawtree, the first English martyr for heresy, was burned alive in Smithfield; and the light of such fires was kept up in England for more than a century.

(d) In spite of such perils, bitter theological controversy raged in England, diverting many minds from the temper that is favorable to literary studies, yet educating many minds to think keenly on the most difficult problems.

(e) It was in this century that the future influence of every wise thought was enlarged by the invention of printing, made by John Gutenberg in 1438, and introduced into England by William Caxton about 1475.

(f) For a hundred years and more before the fifteenth century, the impulse had been growing in Europe, to turn away from the tasteless mass of mediaval literature to the study of the Roman and Greek classics. This impulse was advancing under great disadvantages, the principal one being the lack of Greek books and of Greek teachers. In 1453, about the time that the art of printing was perfected by Gutenberg, Constantinople, then a vast Greek city, was captured by the Turks; and multitudes of the finest Greek scholars, carrying with them copies of the best Greek classics, were turned adrift upon Western Europe to gain a livelihood by teaching Greek. They and their books were everywhere welcomed with unspeakable homage; and the push they gave to the revival of ancient learning can hardly be overstated. England, as the westernmost barrier of Europe, was of course the last to be reached by this new light shining out of the East; but it was reached in due time, and that, too, before the end of the fifteenth century.

(g) Two other great events occurred in that period, which greatly stimulated mental activity and widened the range of human thought in all European countries, and especially in England: these events were the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, and the discovery of America in 1492.

(h) During the fifteenth century, extraordinary zeal was shown in England for the foundation and improvement of

colleges. Then it was, that, at Oxford, Lincoln College was founded, besides All Souls, and Magdalene; then it was that at Cambridge was erected a building for a library and divinity school, "the most magnificent structure of which the university yet had to boast;" then it was that Eton College was founded; and in Scotland, the first of her universities, that of St. Andrews, and the second, that of Glasgow.

(i) There were likewise then in England several influential noblemen and statesmen who loved letters, were themselves considerable scholars, and by founding libraries, protecting authors, and themselves becoming authors, at once gave a new dignity to scholarly pursuits, and a new impulse to English literature. Such were John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester; Duke Humphrey; Earl Rivers; and Sir John Fortescue.

2. Besides these facts bearing in a general and sometimes indirect way upon the progress of English literature in the fifteenth century, we ought to take note of the great progress then made, not only in the literary use of English in preference to Latin and French, but especially in the quality of the English that was then used. The language underwent during that century a constant and rapid amelioration; it grew in smoothness, copiousness, and expressiveness. It is the opinion of George P. Marsh, that, in ecclesiastical prose, the fifteenth century "made a considerable advance upon Wiclif in vocabulary, and more especially in the logical structure of period;" and that the two most eminent poets of the fifteenth century, Lydgate and King James I., " exhibit . . . increased affluence and polish of diction as compared with Chaucer." Indeed, so rapid were the improvements which then went forward in our language, that the writings of the latter part of the fourteenth century seemed to readers in the latter part of the fifteenth century to be marred by uncouth and obsolete words. For instance, William Caxton printed in 1482 that English translation of Higden's "Polychronicon" which had been finished by John Trevisa in 1387; but in his preface, Caxton thought it necessary to insert this explanation: "I, William Caxton, a simple person, have endeavored me to write, first over, all the said book of Polychronicon,' and somewhat have changed the rude and

old English, that is to wit, certain words which in these days be neither used ne understood." The space between Trevisa and Caxton was no greater than that between Cowper or Burke, and writers of the present day; yet in the former case the language had so rapidly developed that some of the diction of Trevisa seemed "rude" to Caxton, and to be in his days "neither used ne understood."

If the fifteenth century did not add to our literature a single masterpiece, at least it fed with its very mists the great streams of the future. Scattered personal interest sped over the scene as a wild mass of clouds, and rolled at times into a tempest to which mists of darkness seemed to be reserved forever. But in the clods of the earth - among its unconsidered people — there lay forces to which even mist and storm gave energy; and still over all there shone the light of Him whose strength is in the clouds. The vigor of a nation lies, at all times, in the character and action of the common body of its people. The highest genius, which implies good sense, true insight, and quick sympathy, must draw its sustenance from the surrounding world of man and nature. When it mistakes, if it ever can mistake, the conventional life of a court for the soul of a nation, seeking to strike root down into that only and draw support from that, it must be as good seed fallen among stones. When it mistakes, if it ever can mistake, the mere dust of the highroad, the day's fashions blown about by every wind, for source of life, it dies under the feet of the next-comer. The good soil is everywhere in the minds of men. Culture may be confined to a few patches, but everywhere in the common ground lies that of which fruit shall come.

3. Let us study, first, the poets of this century, and afterward the prose-writers. Of poets, there were only three of much mark, John Lydgate, Thomas Occleve, and James I. of Scotland. In the latter part of the century, there arose two other prominent poets, -John Skelton and William Dunbar; but their principal activity lay in the sixteenth century, and we shall defer our account of them until we come to deal with the sixteenth century.

The three poets first named were alike in this, that they

avowed themselves as the poetic children of Chaucer, and were content to be merely his imitators. This, of course, deprives them of all claim to be regarded as original or independent forces in our literature.

John Lydgate was born not later than 1370, at the village of Lydgate, in Suffolk. In the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds he was ordained subdeacon in 1389, deacon in 1393, and priest in 1397. After studying at Oxford, Paris, and Padua, he opened a school of rhetoric at his monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, where Dan (that is Dominus) John Lydgate, the monk of Bury, became a famous teacher of literature and the art of versifying. He was well read in ancient lore; mathematician also, and astronomer, as well as orator and poet; a bright, pleasant, and earnest man, who wrote clear fluent verse in any style then reputable, but who was most apt at the telling of such moral stories as his public liked. He preferred to take his heroes and heroines out of the Martyrology, and he could write pleasantly to order for the library of any monastery the legend of its patron saint. Since he wrote so much (there are not less than two hundred and fifty works bearing his name), and almost always as a story-teller, he found many readers, and his rhyming supplied some of the favorite tales of his time. Lydgate wrote for Henry V. "The Life of Our Lady;" he sang the tale of St. Alban, the English proto-martyr, of his own St. Edmund, and of many a saint more. He could catch the strain of popular song, and satirize the licking up of money which leaves the poor man hopeless of justice, in his "London Lickpenny," whereof the measure is enlivened with the street-cries of his time. He could write morality in the old court allegorical style; he could kneel at the foot of the cross, and offer to his God the sacrifice of a true outburst of such song as there was in him. John Lydgate was not a poet of great genius, but he was a man with music in his life. He was full of a harmony of something more than words, not more diffuse than his age liked him to be, and therefore, with good reason, popular and honored among English readers in the fifteenth century.

He is to be remembered for three great poems which con