SOURCE: Lauritis, Joseph A. “Second Thoughts on Style in Lydgate's Life of Our Lady.” In Essays and Studies in Language and Literature, edited by Herbert H. Petit, pp. 12-23. Pittsburgh: Dequesne University Press, 1964.

[In the following essay, Lauritis claims that The Life of Our Lady is a poem less literary than “bardic,” as much of it has the ring of improvised speech rather than composed lyric.]

After pursuing with conventional apparatus the study of John Lydgate's use of methods and materials, there remains in the mind of the writer a lingering impression that in the Life of Our Lady¹ we may have a poem less literary than “bardic”. The syntactical “difficulties” somehow have the ring of speech. The speaker generally controls his materials but he seems rather to improvise as he goes along than to compose.

In view of the great volume of his poetic output (almost five times that of Chaucer), Lydgate may even have frequently dictated (as a monastic religious superior with many monks in his jurisdiction, he probably made use of amanuenses to copy dictation). We can recognize qualities of the experienced story-teller in the repetitions, tautologies, inversions, parentheses, duplications, synonyms, parallelism, variations of terminology, pleonasms, “stop-gap” expressions in the second half of his line, the hopping from direct to indirect speech and reverse, the use of romance words and “aureate” terms, especially for riming² (like the spontaneous use of “technical” words in the ordinary speech of modern lawyers, engineers, scientists and physicians) and the faithful reference to remembered and unremembered sources.³

Word-coinage and derivation played an important part in the development of Lydgate's style. John Mendenhall (whose large and extraordinary speaking vocabulary this former student fondly recalls!) refers to Lydgate's practice of word-formation: “the vocabulary of that most prolific writer has been painstakingly checked up on by Dr. Georg Reismuller of Munich with interesting results. The intention was to list all the words from French or Latin which Lydgate first used in English. The result is a total of over eight hundred words, the largest number of which are truly new borrowings or formations. Some, while not discovered earlier in English books, are quite natural developments of words already in use. … They are, moreover, generally striking and apposite”.⁴

John Metham, the English Chaucerian (fl. 1448), points out in the Envoy to Cleope (11. 2192-2197), the “aureate” quality of Lydgate's verse:

Eke John Lydgate, sumtyme monke off Byry,
Hys bokys endytyd the termys off retoryk
And halff changyd Latyne, with consceytys off poetry
And crafty imagynacionys off things fantastyk;
But eke hys quyght her schewyd, and hys late work,
How that hys contynwauns made hym both poyet and a clerk.(5)

Lydgate used “new borrowings or formations” in words like the astrological terms:

1. domefieing—Fall of Princes, General Prologue, 1.299;⁶
2. y-stellyfied—Troy-Book, II, 4486,⁷Temple of Glas, 1.136,⁸Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 1.18835,⁹Life of Our Lady, III, 1.116;
3. deifyede—Life of Our Lady, III, 1.114

The use of the word “phares” in Life of Our Lady, III, 1.129, represents Lydgate's equivalent for the Greek word for “lighthouse” in the Odyssey, IV, 1.354-355: “The island is in the bay of Alexandria, famous for its lighthouse.”

This leads to another question: did Lydgate read Greek? Homer and the Greek dramatists and poets? Two references to Homer in his Troy-Book strongly suggest that Lydgate went directly to the Greek to complete the story of Troy as he read it in Guido della Colonna.

In the first, Lydgate defends Guido's version of the Trojan War against that of Homer. He accuses of Homer of lying:

To hyde trouthe falsely vnder cloude
And the sothe of malys for to schroude,
As Omer dide, the whiche in his writyng
I-feyned hathe ful many diuers thyng
That neuer was …

(Prologue 264-269)

The lines do not necessarily prove that Lydgate quoted from a Greek text. The following lines, however, leave little doubt:

And in his (Homer's) dites, þat wer so fresche and gay
With sugred wordes vnder hony soote
His galle is hidde lowe by the rote
That it may nouȝt outewarde ben espied
And al for he with Grekis was allied,
Ther-for he was to hem fauourable
In myche thing, whiche is nouȝt commendable
Of hem þat lyst to demen after ryȝt.

(Prologue 276-283)

This is a clear literary judgment which openly assesses the linguistic and lyrical qualities of Homer's style. Customarily, Lydgate readily acknowledged his sources by name or by such expressions as “bokes olde” or “clerkys” of “my auctour”, but he seems to insist on his own authority here.

The second reference concerns the mustering of the Greek ships for the expedition against Troy. Lydgate suddenly finds the list incomplete:

Ful many schip was in þis navie—
Mo þan Guydo maketh rehersaile
Toward Troye with Grekis for to saile
For as Omer in his discripcioun
Of Grekysche schipis makeþ mencioun
Schortly affermyng, þat man was neuer borne
Þat swych a noumbre of schippis saw to-forne

(II, 11.5196-5202)

Although Lydgate announces his departure from Guido to complete the story of the catalogue of the ships, nothing in the Iliad corresponds to “man was neuer borne / þat swych a noumbre of schippis saw toforne”. We may have here a typical example of the poet's method of translation: “I leue þe wordis and folwe þe sentence”.

Lydgate's explication of the titles for the feast of the Epiphany also points to an easy familiarity with Greek:

Comyth this worde of Epyphanye.
And this word Epi by discripcion
Is sayde of heght, as I can signyfie;
And a shewing by demonstracion
Is phanos sayde; and so by gode reason,
Epi and phanos …

(Book V, 463-468)

For theos is as moche for to mene
As god in englisshe, yf ye lust to se;
Phanos a shewyng withouten any wene
…
Ye truly may calle it theophane.

(Book V, 505-511)

For Bethe in Inglisshe by discripcion
Is callede an house or a mancion
Of which myracle (changing of wine into water)(10)
Bethphanye this hathe the name.

(Book V, 523-525)

Fer in desert this day also, I rede,
…
Fyve thousande, I fynd that he dyde fede
…
For this word phagi vnto our entent
Is sayde of fedying or refeccion;
…
Ye Iustely may phagyphane it call.

(Book V, 527-539)

To return to the consideration of “bardic” traits recognizable in the Life of Our Lady, let us look at the manner in which Lydgate repeats a story familiar to a mediaeval audience. Lydgate, not now professionally translating, as in the Fall of Princes and Troy-Book and Pilgramage of the Life of Man, never departs from the well-known facts in the biography of the Virgin and nearly all of his descriptions of her and of other characters in the story have easily identifiable counterparts somewhere in the sacred and profane literature of the day. In addition, Lydgate, in typical “bardic” fashion forgets or misnames his sources—“see the reference to “Alquyn” in Book IV, 64, nowhere to be found in Alcuin's writings; and in Book II, 454, to “the vision of Elizabeth” there he says Our Lady was 16 years of age when Christ was born. Neither Elizabeth of Hungary nor Elizabeth of Schonau agrees with him. The mistaken reference to Jeremias's use of the word “dromedaries” in the Legenda Aurea¹¹ could easily have been checked as belonging to Isaias 60:8¹² but Lydgate simply repeats it (Book V, 123). He also misquotes David for Isaias 16:1¹³ in Book III, 578, and for Ecclus. 36:1-18¹⁴ in Book III, 596.

In the first of several sets of gift-symbols in the story of the Magi, Lydgate forgets the myrrh equivalent (Book V, 558). He makes an easy mistranslation in Book III, of “iorney” for the Pseudo-Matthew “iumentum”¹⁵ and of Bede's “… ut haec legitime Domino valeant consecrari, ovem necesse est innocentiae, et turturem pariter sive columbam compunctionis offerat”¹⁶ by rendering it “and offre a turtil, firste of Innocense, / And a dove next for his offence” (Book VI, 209-210).

In Book III, 577 ff., 614 ff., and 1467-5182, Lydgate lists two sets of prophecies referring to Our Lady and the Child. This gives the reader the impression that he followed no particular sequence but simply reminisced in leisurely fashion and made no attempt to correlate the lists. In Book III, 1317-1386, he repeats the story of the destruction of the statute of “myghty Romulous” already given in Book III, 1066 ff., and in Book III, 485 ff. and 549 ff., he makes two explications of the “Gloria in excelsis Deo”.

These and other instances of apparently slovenly work, have led the writer to suspect that we have missed here a crucial method of Lydgatian composition: the use of “rhetorical colors”. In the case of the dual list of prophecies and the repeated Romulus story, does Lydgate intend to emphasize by amplification, using expolitio (enlargement of a topic in a different way), and interpretatio (repetition of an idea in different words)? The answer to that question may throw new light on Lydgate's style and reveal firmer structural strength in this and other poems.

Another “bardic” trait recognizable in Lydgate is the unconscious absorption of the materials and formulas of other poets. He probably knew much of Chaucer by heart as in Book II, 606: “As doon the sterres, in the frosty nyght” (Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 268¹⁷). Other Chaucer analogues:

But vndir hope, that mercy passith Right

(Book II, 425)

For gentil mercy oghte to passen right

(Knight's Tale, 3089)

Here may men seen that mercy passeth right

(Troilus and Criseyde iii, 1282)

But life sool whan he hathe lost his make

(Book VI 234)

Soul as the turtil that lost hath hir make

(Merchant's Tale, 835)

To make hem stonde stille as any stone

(Book IV 390)

And he stod, as stille as stoon

(House of Fame, 1605)

… as stille as any ston

(Legend of Good Women, F 310)

For she is fayre, and fresshe as Rose in may

(Book I, 729)

And she was fayr as is the Rose in may

(Legend of Good Women F 613)

But she all way constant, as a wall

(Book II, 1509)

And she ay sad and constant as a wal

(The Clerk's Tale, 1047)

Whan al was hust and al was in silence

(Book III, 1)

Whan al was hust, than lay she stille and thought

(Troilus and Criseyde II, 915)

A curious unconscious borrowing in the Troy-Book shows how deeply this practice had developed. Lydgate transmuted the idea but retained the rime-words!

Þat first were hurt with hir fyry brond
And sche þat is goddes of many lond.

(Book II, 5599-5600)

So soore hath Venus hurt hym hire brond
As that she bar it daunsynge in hire hond.

(Merchant's Tale, 1777-1778)

The exposition of the allegory of the turtle-dove in Book VI, 239-308 provides another example of the use of familiar materials in the hands of the “bard”. Lydgate makes the long and involved exposition before giving the Latin text. The artistic and/or homiletic method would enunciate the text before the exposition.

Lydgate frequently displays, by parentheses and asides, the conversational flavor of his approach and the consciousness of an imaginary auditory audience. Throughout the poem, he discourses directly either with his hearers or with Our Lady. He resorts to every excuse to move away from the third person:

… who so luste take hede

(I 72)

… a noon as ye shall here

(II 359)

If ye lust here of humble affection

(III 11)

And lyke as Alquyn wryt, it is devysede
That criste Ihesus, who-so luste to see

(IV 64-64)

In verrey sothe as I remembre can

(V 20)

And euery man be glad and of good chere

(VI 192)

Katherine Locock found a “strong resemblance between Lydgate's parallelisms and those of the Psalmist”¹⁸ and Ernest Sieper cautioned “that we are not dealing with a mere chance occurrence (but) a principle of art consciously employed and systematically carried through. … Lydgate is, in point of fact, not so far removed from a mere parallelism such as meets us in the poetry of the Hebrews.”¹⁹

This strong impression of line cleavage in Lydgate receives support from other features of his style. The Life of Our Lady abounds in duplicate and triplicate expressions after the caesura. The caesura itself occurs almost invariably in the same place, i.e., after the second foot. Again, principally in the second half of the line, the poem abounds in variations of terminology. “Always”, for instance, will appear as:

boþe erly and late

(I 457)

at morew and eke at eve

(III 816)

first or laste

(VI 65)

Al-waye new and newe

(III 692)

late or elles sone

(III 1754)

“Everywhere and Nowhere”:

bothe in lenthe and brede

(I 75)

in land nor see

(III 1062)

in euery manere londe

(VI 353)

“Never”:

nethir to ne froo

(II 698)

For selde or neuere

(II 1461)

neythir by worde ne soun

(VI 103)

(See also the variety of ways Lydgate used “hert” and “affection” with adjectives and adverbs throughout his work in the notes to the Life of Our Lady, pp. 715-716).

Alliterations occur most frequently in the latter part of the line and their attractiveness distracts the reader from noticing the verseformula, a bardic device that holds the poem together with colorful ribbons. Lydgate could probably improvise a poem on any given subject by using the same devices in the second half of the lines of a new poem as he had employed in his previous work.

If we accept as plausible the theory of the “bardic” character of the composition of the Life of Our Lady, may we also make fresh conjectures about Lydgate's metre?

That Lydgate could retain a strong metrical structure and a sustained narrative in following a “bardic” method in the Life of Our Lady ought not prove too taxing for plausibility. He had at his disposal all the necessary raw materials: Scriptural canonical and apocryphal works, the Historia Scholastica, the Legenda Aurea and other encyclopedic collections. He had completed his metrical apprenticeship with the recently finished Siege of Thebes and Troy-Book and the decasyllabic line, after so many thousand of attempts, must have become as automatic a habit as scales to a virtuoso. Lydgate everywhere shows this easy skill and conscious power in the Life of Our Lady. One can see, too, that a fixed metrical device such as the flexible rime royal stanza, rather than the closely-knit heroic couplet, would become in his hands an instrument for planning and predicting his rimes and verse-formulas many lines ahead.

A review of some of the principal critical analyses of Lydgate's metre uncovers basic disagreements which may contain the germ of a new view.

The British Librarian in 1737, in reviewing William Webbe's A Discourse of English Poetrie, printed in London by John Charlewood in 1586, makes this remarkable comparison between Chaucer and Lydgate:

“… Chaucer the God of English Poets, next after (Gower), if not equal in Time, hath left many Works both for Delight and profitable Knowledge, far exceeding any other that as yet, ever since His Time, directed their Studies that way. Tho' his Stile may now seem blunt and coarse, yet in him may be seen the perfect Shape of a right Poet. By his delightsome Vein he so gull'd the Ears of Men with his Devices, that tho' Corruption bore such a sway that Learning and Truth could scarce shew themselves, yet without Controll might he grid at the Vices and Abuses of all States, and gall them with very sharp and eager Inventions; which he do so learnedly and pleasantly, that none therefore would call him question. Lydgate, for good Proportion of his Verse and meetly current Stile, as the Time afforded, is by our Author thought surely comparable with Chaucer, yet more occupied in superstitious and odd Matters than was requisite in so good a Wit; which though he handled them commendably, yet the Matters themselves being not so commendable, his Esteem has been the less.”

(p. 88).

Hence, one hundred and three hundred years after his death, Lydgate retains the highest esteem both for “Stile” and “Wit”. We know that later scholarship has restored the melody to Chaucer's line (blunt and coarse above), but what accounts for the judgment of one our greatest fifteenth-century editors when she dismisses Lydgate as “systematically inept”?²⁰ And for Professor Erdman's belief that Lydgate's verses contain a “great number of hard and rugged lines”?²¹ Where, in the lost corridors of time, did Lydgate pick up “a defective ear, ignorance of the grammatical principles on which Chaucer's metrical system was founded”?²²

And what of the whole ‘directory’ of modern editors who so evidently repeat their masters without having attempted their own scansion? We hear an almost unanimous chorus of negation but very little affirmative scholarship on Lydgate's verse in the last forty years. Explanation of affirmative effects by negative causes puts a mighty strain on the scholarly apparatus.

The writer feels compelled to search out editors who assume an affirmative posture toward Lydgate and the fifteenth-century poets. It is the stand of Henry Bergen (“the tendency he (Lydgate) followed … was to return from Chaucer's and Gower's syllabic purism to the rougher and readier traditional usage of his countrymen”)²³; Professor Gummere (“… our heroic verse was originally a late form of A.-S. long verse”)²⁴; Dr. Triggs (Lydgate used in composition the principle of both metre and stress”)²⁵; and C. S. Lewis (“… but in Lydgate the strong medial pause and essentially undecasyllabic movement [‘Irows and wood and malencholik’] are already normal, and the fact that we usually have nine or ten syllables makes little difference”).²⁶

In “A Study of the Metrical Use of the Inflectional E in Middle English with particular Reference to Chaucer and Lydgate”, Charlotte Babcock also adopts an affirmative attitude: “Lydgate was the last poet in whose works the inflectional e was a living thing, and it was so only in his earlier productions; after him it was to all intents and purposes dead, and none of the later attempts to revive it could impart to it any real vitality. … Lydgate, then, may be said, in point of language, to bridge the gulf between the mediæval and modern or (changing the figure) to stand like a two-headed Janus facing the past and the future.”²⁷

Henry MacCracken, the editor of the minor poems of Lydgate, sums up his study of Lydgate's versification: “I have tried reading Troy-Book aloud, and have come to agree with its editor that it (the broken-backed line) is a pleasant variation of the line. The phenomenon is not unknown in later times. … But I believe with Professor Kaluza that this broken-back line in most instances is easily mended and that it was far less used than editors of Lydgate would have us believe (italics mine). … Throughout his life he centered his attention on the even flow of his verse, and on the simplicity of structure so noticeable in Chaucer. Those two ideals led him into redundancy and exceeding looseness of grammatical form, but they never misled him into unmelodious measures.”²⁸

Despite the wide diversity even in the above affirmative thinking, it perhaps represents the only kind of thinking that can lead the way to the recovery of the lost key to the “good Proportion of his Verse and meetly current Stile” Editors “re-discovered” Chaucer with the decoding of the function of the final e. That certainly was affirmation and not negation.

Lydgate's own admission that he took no heed ‘nouther of shorte nor long’ (Troy-Book, II, 184), has been dismissed as a mediæval poetic topos by some and accepted as a confession of inadequacy by others. It may just as easily point to his real method. Why, indeed, bother with short or long when you write for stress? When your readers have been bred on the heavy-stressed alliterative line? When English metre was never a matter of short or long? Finally, the reference to length of syllables may imply no more than a sneer at contemporaries who imitated not only the French decasyllable but also the French method of counting syllables and measuring quantitative values.

The line-count of his work, whenever it has been attempted, clearly shows that Lydgate had a good grasp of the decasyllabic line and a conscious mastery of its varieties. Chaucer “has, normally, a high percentage of regular iambic lines, about fifty percent of his work in each”.²⁹ Lydgate, in the Life of Our Lady has almost 58 percent regular iambic (Type A) lines. Otto Glauning's scansion of The Nightingale³⁰ reveals 76.5 percent Type A lines, and of A Sayenge of the Nightingale,³¹ 68 percent. His scansion further shows that the first nightingale poem contains 5 percent Type C and 2.5 percent Type D lines; in the second poem, the proportions are 12 percent and 10 percent. Because of the great reluctance of so many editors to agree on the authenticity of Type C and Type D lines and four- and six-stress lines among the decasyllables in the extant mss. of Chaucer's poetry, there seems to be no published break-down of the percentages.

The writer does not intend to assess the metrical merits of Chaucer and Lydgate by innuendo. What we want to discover are the factors that may have led to the “down-grading” of Lydgate's metre since 1737 when it was still thought to have “good Proportion”. Lydgate himself in many places disavows comparison with “my maister” and most clearly in the Troy-Book:

þer is no makyng to his equipolent;
We do but halt, who-so takeþ hede,
Þat medle of makyng, withouten any drede.
Whan we wolde his stile counterfeit
We may al day oure colour grynde and bete
Tempre our azour and vermyloun:
But al I holde but presumpcioun—
It folweþ nat, þerfore I let be.

(II, 4712 ff.)

This infrequently noticed tribute to Chaucer should settle the question of Lydgate's ‘nouther schort nor long’—the passage shows that he not only knew about it but worked hard at it. It also discloses, in a delightfully surprising metaphor, another side of Lydgate: his knowledge of the manufacture and mixing of paint.

Additional references in the Troy-Book throw light on Lydgate's metrical self-appraisal and his unqualified discipleship to Chaucer:

For wel wot I moch þing is wrong
Falsly metrid, þoþe of shorte & long.

(V, 3483 f.)

For in metring þouȝ þer be ignoraunce
Yet in þe story ȝe may fynde pleassaunce

(V, 3491 f.)

… seke his (Chaucer's) boke þat is left be-hynde,
Som goodly word þer-in for to fynde,
To sette amonge þe crokid lynys rude
Which I do write. …

(II, 4703 f.)

For he þat was gronde of wel-seying,
In al hys lyf hyndred no makyng
My maister Chaucer, þat founde ful many spot—
Hym liste nat pinche nor gruche at euery blot,
Nor meue hym silf to parturbe his reste
(I haue herde telle), but seide alwaeie þe best
Suffring goodly of his gentilnes
Ful many þing enbracid with rudnes.

(V, 3519 ff.)

Does Lydgate here hint that Chaucer, by his indulgence of imperfections in other metrists, reveals the state of his own verse: “hymliste nat pinche nor gruche at euery blot”? Editors who still cannot except the authenticity of Chaucer's short-syllabled lines take note!

It seems clear, then, that just as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not fit Chaucer's metre to the language of their times and we have learned to read him not with the intonations of our own times but with those of the fourteenth century, so, too, we may often fail to understand Lydgate's metre because we read him with a twentieth—and not a fifteenth-century intonation.

In expounding his theory of the “Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line”, C. S. Lewis remarks that: “If a man understands a metre he can fit it to the language he hears spoken in his own time: if he cannot do so, that means he does not understand …”³² This observation could easily describe Lydgate's fifteenth—and sixteenth-century readers and serve as a fitting reply to Professor Schick's “sely” statement that “their ears must surely have been singularly inpenetrable to anything like rhythmical harmony”.³³

Notes

1. Joseph A. Lauritis, Vernon F. Gallagher and Ralph A. Klinefelter, John Lydgate's Life of Our Lady (Pittsburgh, 1960).

2. “It is quite obvious to anyone reading in the literature of the fifteenth century that a large proportion of the rhymes are Romance words and not only that, but many in addition are odd, choice or aureate.” (John Cooper Mendenhall, Aureate Terms. A study in the literary diction of the Fifteenth Century [Lancaster, 1919], p. 50).

3. Eleanor Hammond, who gives a list of seventy words first used by Lydgate in her English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, N. C. and London, 1927), pp. 87-88, remarks that “as one works with the New English Dictionary, it is noticeable how often the three principal fifteenth-century translators, Trevisa, Lydgate and Caxton, are responsible for the introduction of abstract but useful terms for the development of the power to express shades of thought.” In the Troy-Book (II 160-197, passim), Lydgate expounded his method of translation and if we use his exposition as a guide it will help us better understand how he commonly used borrowed materials: “I leue þe wordis and folwe þe sentence. … But me conforme fully in substance, / Only in menyng.”

4. p. 46. See also note #4, p. 213, Life of Our Lady, for Dr. Georg Reismuller's list of romance words in the poem.

5. Hardin Craig, ed., John Metham's Works (1906; EETSOS, 132), p. 80.

6. Henry Bergen, ed., (1924-27; EETSES, 121-124).

7. Henry Bergen, ed., (1906-35; EETSES, 97, 103, 106, 126).

8. J. Schick, ed., (1891; EETSES, 60).

9. F. J. Furnivall and Katharine B. Locock, edd. (EETSES, 77, 83, 92).

10. Explication and italics mine.

11. Th. Graesse, ed., (2 ed. Leipzig, 1876).

12. The Holy Rible, translated from the Latin Vulgate (New York, 1914).

13. ibid.

14. ibid.

15. Constantinus Tischendorf, ed., Evangelia Apocrypha (Leipzig, 1876), p. 76.

16. Venerabilis Beda, Opera Omnia, PL, XCII, 342.

17. F. N. Robinson, ed., (Boston, 1957).

18. Katharine Locock, ed., The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (1904; EETSES, 92), Part III, p. xlix.

19. Ernest Sieper, ed., Lydgate's Reson and Sensuallyte (1903; EETSES, 89), pp. 48-50.

20. Eleanor P. Hammond, “The Nine-Syllabled Pentamenter Line in Some Post-Chaucerian Manuscripts”, Modern Philology, XXIII, 147.

21. Axel Erdman and Eilert Ekwall, edd., Lydgate's Siege of Thebes (1930; EETSES, 125), p. 52.

22. W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London, 1926), I, 328.

23. Henry Bergen, ed., Lydgate's Troy-Book (1906; EETSES, 97), p. xvii.

24. Francis B. Gummere, “The Translation of Beowulf and the relation of Ancient and Modern English Verse”, The American Journal of Philology (1866), V, 71.

25. Oscar L. Triggs, ed., The Assembly of Gods (1896; EETSES, 69), p. xix.

26. “The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line”, Essays and Studies (Oxford, 1939), XXIV, 39.

27. PMLA, XXIX (1912), p. 92.

28. Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate (1911; EETSES, 107), p. viii.

29. Hammond, p. 20.

30. Lydgate's Minor Poems. The Two Nightingale Poems (1900; EETSES, 80), p. xxiii.

31. id.

32. p. 28.

33. p. lvi.