and became so distinguished a proficient in polite learning, that he opened a school in his monastery for teaching the sons of the nobility the arts of versification and the elegances of composition. Yet although philology was his object, he was not unfamiliar with the fashionable philosophy; he was not only a poet and a rhetorician, but a geometrician and astronomer, a theologist and a disputant. Lydgate made considerable additions to those amplifications of our language, in which Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve led the way; and he is the first of our writers whose style is clothed with that perspicuity in which phraseology appears at this day to an English reader. To enumerate Lydgate's pieces would be to write the catalogue of a little library. No poet seems to have possessed greater versatility of talents. He moves with equal ease in every mode of composition. His hymns and his ballads have the same degree of merit; and whether his subject be the life of a hermit or a hero, of St. Austin or Guy Earl of Warwick, ludicrous or legendary, religious or romantic, a history or an allegory, he writes with facility. His transitions were rapid, from works of the most serious and laborious kind, to sallies of levity and pieces of popular entertainment. His muse was of universal access; and he was not only the poet of his monastery, but of the world in general. If a disguising was intended by the company of Goldsmiths, a mask before his majesty at Eltham, a May-game for the sheriffs and aldermen of London, a mumming before the lord-mayor, a procession of pageants from the creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a carol for the coronation, Lydgate was consulted, and gave the poetry. His manner is naturally verbose and diffuse. This circumstance contributed in no small degree to give a clearness and a fluency to his phraseology. For the same reason he is often tedious and languid. His chief excellence is in description, especially when the subject admits a flowery diction. He is seldom pathetic or animated. His most esteemed works are, his History of Thebes, intended as a continuation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; the Falls of Princes, a metrical paraphrase of Boccaccio's De Casibus; and the History of the Siege of Troy, a translation into verse of Colonna's prose history, which, containing the substance of Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis, and comprising all the materials of one class of romantic history, is valuable as a specimen of the learning as well as of the credulity of our ancestors. The popularity of this work was excessive, unbounded, and continued without much diminution during at least two centuries. To this the praises of succeeding writers bear ample testimony; but it is confirmed by a direct and most singular evidence. An anonymous writer has taken the pains to modernise the whole poem, consisting of 28,000 verses; to change the ancient context, and almost every rhyme, and to throw the whole into six-line stanzas; and yet so little was he solicitous to raise his own reputation at the expense of the original author, that though he has altered the title and preface of the work, he has still ascribed it to Lydgate. This strange instance of perverted talents and industry was published in 1614, under the title of The Life and Death of Hector. Lydgate died somewhere about 1460. By Gray, Lydgate is ranked superior, not only to Hoccleve, but to Gower, in choice of expression and smoothness of verse. A selection from his minor poems has been published by the Percy Society, under the direction of Mr. Halliwell. JOHN HARDING. (Born circa 1390.) The first poet that occurs in the reign of Edward IV. is John Harding. He was of northern extraction, and educated in the family of Lord Henry Percy; and at twenty-five years of age hazarded his fortunes at the decisive battle of Shrewsbury, fought against Percy and the Scots under Lord Douglas, in the year 1403. He appears to have been indefatigable in examining original records, chiefly with a design of ascertaining the fealty due from the Scottish kings to the crown of England; and, for the elucidation of this important inquiry, he carried many instruments from Scotland at the hazard of his life, which he delivered at different times to the fifth and sixth Henry and to Edward IV. These investigations seem to have fixed his mind on the study of our national antiquities and history. At length he clothed his researches in rhyme, which he dedicated, under that form, to King Edward IV., and with the title of The Chronicle of England unto the Reigne of King Edward the Fourth, in verse. The copy probably presented to the king, although it exhibits at the end the arms of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, most elegantly transcribed on vellum, and adorned with superb illuminations, is preserved among Selden's manuscripts in the Bodleian Library; it is richly bound and studded. At the end is a curious map of Scotland, together with many prose pieces by Harding of the historical kind. The work was printed at London, in 4to, by Grafton, who has prefixed a dedication of three leaves, in verse, to Thomas duke of Norfolk: a greatly improved edition has since been edited by Sir Henry Ellis. The author, concise and compendious in his narrative of events from Brutus to the reign of King Henry IV., is minute and diffuse in relating those affairs of which, for more than sixty years, he was a living witness, from that period to the reign of Edward IV. The poem seems to have been completed about the year 1470. In his final chapter the writer exhorts the king to recall his rival, King Henry VI., and to restore the partisans of that unhappy prince. The work is fit only for the attention of an antiquary. Harding, in fact, may be pronounced the most impotent of our metrical historians, especially when we recollect the great improvements which English poetry had now received. His laborious and authentic chronicle has hardly those more modest graces which could properly recommend and adorn a detail of the British story in prose. He has left some pieces in the latter class of composition; and Winstanley says, as his prose was very usefull, so was his poetry as much delightful!" Fuller, too, affirms our author to have "drunk as deep a draught of Helicon as any of his age," and the assertion may be partly true; it is certain, however, that the diction and imagery of our poetic composition would have remained in just the same state had Harding never written. 66 WILLIAM OF NASSYNGTON. (Circa 1380.) William of Nassyngton, a proctor or advocate in the Ecclesiastical Court of York, translated into English rhyme (about 1418) from the Latin, The Mirror of Life, a Treatise on the Trinity and Unity; a poem of several thousand verses, written by John of Waldly, an Augustine friar of Yorkshire, student in the Augustine convent at Oxford, the provincial of his order in England, and a strenuous opponent of Wickliffe. GEORGE ASHBY. (Born circa 1390.) George Ashby, clerk of the signet to Margaret, queen of Henry VI., wrote a moral poem for the use of their son Prince Edward, on the Active Policy of a Prince, finished in the author's eightieth year. The prologue begins with a compliment to "Maisters Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate;" a proof of the estimation which that celebrated triumvirate still enjoyed. The poem was never printed; but a copy, with a small mutilation at the end, remains among Bishop More's manuscripts at Cambridge. ANDREW WYNTOWN. Andrew of Wyntown appears to have been born about the middle of the long reign of David II., as he complains of the infirmities of old age when engaged in the first copy of his Chronicle. He is supposed to have been of the family of Alane of Wyntown, though this is but conjecture. He was a canon regular of the Priory of St. Andrews, and in or before the year 1395, was, by the favour of his fellow-canons, elected prior of the monastery of St. Serf's Insh, in Loch Leven, one of the most ancient religious establishments of Scotland, founded about the year 700. Here he undertook his Chronicle, which was finished between the 3d September, 1420, and the return of King James from England in April 1424. While our author was engaged on his work, some unknown person, of a genius similar to his own, sent him the history of Scotland, from the birth of David II. to the death of Robert II., apparently written, or rather finished, in the reign of Robert III., which, having examined and improved, he gladly incorporated into his own work. This ample contribution is composed in the same style and same kind of verse with his own work; so that, without the least breach of uniformity, it gives us the singular advantage of having the last eighty-three years of the history composed by two writers, who lived during the greater part of the time they wrote of. Before Wyntown's time, the history of the Scots had been plunged into confusion almost inextricable by an insatiable and ignorant rage for antiquity, which placed the reign of Fergus 1200 years before that of Kenneth MacAlpin, who was made only the tenth in descent from him, thus involving the monstrous absurdity of allowing 120 years to each generation. Wyntown saw and felt the dilemma; but not having sufficiently informed himself frem ancient records, he could see no way of getting rid of it, and fairly gave it up. Having afterwards obtained better information, he found it expedient to give a second improved copy of the Chronicle with the important correction, which, by enumerating the years of Fergus and his successors, reduces his era pretty near to the truth, being even a little below it; though, at the same time, he could not drop the notion that the Scots were in Scotland 245 years before the Picts. But he knew nothing of the 44 (or 39) kings preceding Fergus, nor of his interpolated successors; and, in short, has the happiness to be ignorant of many of the stories which were long deemed essential points of faith in Scottish history. Fordun, our author's contemporary and fellow-labourer (though they were unknown to each other), fell upon a method of settling the chronology of Fergus very easily, by fairly splitting him into two kings, one of whom he places 100 years before his due time, and the other 330 years before the Christian era, leaving, however, the names, actions, and characters of the kings between his two Ferguses to be supplied from the "fine fancy" of Hector Boyse. These fictitious kings constitute the grossest fault in Fordun's history, which, except in this instance, where the ambition of false antiquity for the honour of Scotland has carried him off his feet, is in general compiled from the best materials he could obtain. From a comparison of Fordun and Wyntown, who may be considered as two witnesses ignorant of the evidence given by each other, we may obtain a pretty just view of the unsettled and inaccurate idea which the Scots entertained, about the conclusion of the 14th century, of their early history. It is probable that Wyntown did not very long survive the final conclusion of his work. The exact date of his death is not known. |