JOHN GOWER. [Born about 1325 LITTLE is known of Gower's personal history. "The proud tradition in the Marquis of Stafford's family," says Mr. Todd, "has been, and still is, that he was of Stitenham; and who would not consider the dignity of his genealogy augmented, by enrolling among its worthies the moral Gower ?" His effigies in the church of St. Mary Overies is often inaccurately described as having a garland of ivy and roses on the head. It is, in fact, a chaplet of roses, such as, Thynne says, was anciently worn by knights; a circumstance which is favourable to the suspicion, that has been suggested, of his having been of the rank of knighthood. If Thynne's assertion, respecting the time of the lawyers first entering the Temple, be correct, it will be difficult to reconcile it with the tradition of Gower's having been a student there in his youth. By Chaucer's manner of addressing Gower, the latter appears to have been the elder. He was attached to Thomas of Woodstock, as Chaucer was to John of Gaunt. The two poets appear to have been at one time cordial friends, but ultimately to have quarrelled. Gower tells us himself that he was blind in his old age. Died about 1409.] From his will it appears that he was living in 1408. His bequests to several churches and hospitals, and his legacy to his wife of 1007., of all his valuable goods, and of the rents arising from his manors of Southwell in the county of Nottingham, and of Multon in the county of Suffolk, undeniably prove that he was rich. One of his three great works, the Speculum Meditantis, a poem in French, is erroneously described by Mr. Godwin and others as treating of conjugal fidelity. In an account of its contents in a MS. in Trinity College, Cambridge, we are told that its principal subject is the repentance of a sinner. The Vox Clamantis, in Latin, relates to the insurrection of the commons, in the reign of Richard II. The Confessio Amantis, in English, is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, who is a priest of Venus, and who explains, by apposite stories, and philosophical illustrations all the evil affections of the heart which impede, or counteract the progress and success of the tender passion. His writings exhibit all the crude erudition and science of his age; a knowledge sufficient to have been the fuel of genius, if Gower had possessed its fire. THE TALE OF THE COFFERS OR CASKETS, &c., IN THE FIFTH DOOK OF THE "CONFESSIO AMANTIS." In a cronique thus I rede: Aboute a king, as must nede, Ther was of knyghtes and squiers These olde men upon this thing, And all within his owne entent, The which out of his tresorie Was take, anon he fild full; That other cofre of straw and mulls f Jewels, or precious stones. * In Illustrations of Gower and Chaucer by the Rev. J. H. Todd. b Themselves. c Them. d Like. e Saw. g Rubbish. So that erlichei upon a day There shall no man his hap despise : Of that ye unavanced be, Or elles if it belong on yow, Ye shall be richè men for ever: m Now chese and take which you is lever, They knelen all, and with one vois A knyght shall spekè for hem alle : Tho toke this knyght a yerd' on honde, Whan he had heard the common vois, Hath granted hem her owne chois, This king than in the same stede, OF THE GRATIFICATION WHICH THE LOVER'S PASSION RECEIVES FROM THE SENSE OF HEARING. IN THE SIXTH BOOK. RIGHT as mine eye with his loke Is to myn herte a lusty cooke Of loves foodè delicate; Right so myn eare in his estate, So fair that no wher is none so: Is to myn eare a lusty foode. Ne so far forth restauratif, As ben the wordès of hir mouth. And if it so befalle among, Whan I heare of her voice the steven, Me thinketh it is a blisse of heven. JOHN LYDGATE. [Born, 1379. Died, 1461.] Was born at a place of that name in Suffolk, about the year 1375. His translation (taken through the medium of Laurence's version) of Boccaccio's Fall of Princes, was begun while Henry VI. was in France, where that king never was, but when he went to be crowned at Paris, in 1432. Lydgate was then above threescore. He was a monk of the Benedictine order, at St. Edmund's Bury, and in 1423 was elected prior of Hatfield Brodhook, but the following year had licence to return to his convent again. His condition, one would imagine, should have supplied him with the necessaries of life, yet he more than once complains to his patron, Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, of his wants; and he shows distinctly in one passage, that he did not dislike a little more wine than his convent allowed him. He was full thirty years of age when Chaucer died, whom he calls his master, and who probably was so in a literal sense. His Fall of Princes is rather a paraphrase than a translation of his original. He disclaims the idea of writing "a stile briefe and compendious." A great story he compares to a great oak, which is not to be attacked with a single stroke, but by "a long processe." Gray has pointed out beauties in this writer which had eluded the research, or the taste, of former critics. "I pretend not," says Gray, "to set him on a level with Chaucer, but he certainly comes the nearest to him of any contemporary writer I am acquainted with. His choice of expression and the smoothness of his verse, far surpass both Gower and Occleve. He wanted not art in raising the more tender emotions of the mind." Of these he gives several examples. The finest of these, perhaps, is the following passage, descriptive of maternal agony and tenderness. CANACE, CONDEMNED TO DEATH BY HER FATHER EOLUS, SENDS TO HER GUILTY BROTHER MACAREUS THE LAST TESTIMONY OF HER UNHAPPY PASSION. BOOK I. FOLIO 39. For to remember specially, I praye, If it befall my littel sonne to dye, That thou mayst after some mind on us have, Suffer us both be buried in one grave. I hold him strictly twene my armès twein, Thou and Natùre laidè on me this charge; He, guiltlesse, mustè with me suffer paine, And, sìth thou art at freedom and at large, Let kindnesse ourè love not so discharge, But have a minde, wherever that thou be, Once on a day upon my child and me. On thee and me dependeth the trespace A mouth he has, but wordis hath he none; Cannot complaine alas! for none outrage: Nor grutcheth not, but lies here all alone Still as a lambe, most meke of his visàge. What heart of stèle could do to him damage, Or suffer him dye, beholding the manère And looke benigne of his twein éyén clere.— Writing her letter, awhapped all in drede, SCOTTISH POETRY. THE origin of the Lowland Scottish language has been a fruitful subject of controversy. Like the English, it is of Gothic materials; and, at a certain distance of time from the Norman conquest, is found to contain, as well as its sister dialect of the South, a considerable mixture of French. According to one theory, those Gothic elements of Scotch existed in the Lowlands, anterior to the Anglo-Saxon settlements in England, among the Picts, a Scandinavian race: the subsequent mixture of French words arose from the French connexions of Scotland, and the settlement of Normans among her people; and thus, by the Pictish and Saxon dialects meeting, and an infusion of French being afterwards superadded, the Scottish language arose, independent of modern English, though necessarily similar, from the similarity of its materials. According to another theory, the Picts were not Goths, but Cambro-British, a Celtic race, like the Western Scots who subdued and blended with the Picts, under Kenneth Mac Alpine. Of the same Celtic race were al-o the Britons of Strathclyde, and the antient people of Galloway. In Galloway, though the Saxons overran that peninsula, they are affirmed to have left but little of their blood, and little of their language. In the ninth century, Galloway was new-peopled by the Irish Cruithne, and at the end of the eleventh century was universally inhabited by a Gaelic people. At this latter period, the common language of all Scotland, with the exception of Lothian, and a corner of Caithness, was the Gaelic; and in the twelfth century commenced the progress of the English language into Scotland Proper: so that Scotch is only migrated English. a Lothian, now containing the Scottish metropolis, was, after several fluctuations of possession, annexed to In support of the opposite system, an assertor, better known than trusted, namely Pinkerton, has maintained, that "there is not a shadow of proof, that the Gaelic language was ever at all spoken in the Lowlands of Scotland." Yet the author of Caledonia has given not mere shadows of proof, but very strong grounds, for concluding that, in the first place, to the north of the Forth and Clyde, with the exception of Scandinavian settlements admitted to have been made in Orkney, Caithness, a strip of Sutherland, and partially in the Hebrides, a Gothic dialect was unknown in antient Scotland. Amidst the arguments to this effect deduced from the topography of (the supposed Gothic) Pictland, in which, Mr. Chalmers affirms, that not a Saxon name is to be found older than the twelfth century; and amidst the evidences accumulated from the laws, religion, antiquities, and manners of North Britain, one recorded fact appears sufficiently striking. When the assembled clergy of Scotland met Malcolm Caenmore and Queen Margaret, the Saxon princess was unable to understand their language. Her husband, who had learnt English, was obliged to be their interpreter. All the clergy of Pictland, we are told, were at that time Irish; but among a people with a Gaelic king, and a Gaelic clergy, is it conceivable that the Gaelic language should not have been commonly spoken? With regard to Galloway, or south-western Scotland, the paucity of Saxon names in that peninsula (keeping apart pure or modern English ones) are pronounced, by Mr. G. Chalmers, to show the establishments of the Saxons to have been few and temporary, and their language to the territory of Scotland in 1020; but even in the time of David I. is spoken of as not a part of Scotland. David addresses his "faithful subjects of all Scotland and of Lothian." have been thinly scattered, in comparison with the Celtic. As we turn to the south-east of Scotland, it is inferred from topography, that the Saxons of Lothian never permanently settled to the westward of the Avon; while the numerous Celtic names which reach as far as the Tweed, evince that the Gaelic language not only prevailed in proper Scotland, but overflowed her boundaries, and, like her arms, made inroads on the Saxon soil. Mr. Ellis, in discussing this subject, seems to have been startled by the difficulty of supposing the language of England to have superseded the native Gaelic in Scotland, solely in consequence of Saxon migrations to the north, in the reign of Malcolm Caenmore. Malcolm undoubtedly married a Saxon princess, who brought to Scotland her relations and domestics. Many Saxons also fled into Scotland from the violences of the Norman conquest. Malcolm gave them an asylum, and during his incursions into Cumberland and Northumberland, carried off so many young captives, that English persons were to be seen in every house and village of his dominions, in the reign of David I. But, on the death of Malcolm, the Saxon followers, both of Edgar Atheling and Margaret, were driven away by the enmity of the Gaelic people. Those expelled Saxons must have been the gentry, while the captives, since they were seen in a subsequent age, must have been retained, as being servile, or vileyns. The fact of the expulsion of Margaret and Edgar Atheling's followers, is recorded in the Saxon Chronicle. It speaks pretty clearly for the general Gaelicism of the Scotch at that period; and it also prepares us for what is afterwards so fully illustrated by the author of Caledonia, viz. that it was the new dynasty of Scottish kings, after Malcolm Caenmore, that gave a more diffusive course to the peopling of proper Scotland, by Saxon, by Anglo-Norman, and by Flemish colonists. In the successive charters of Edgar, Alexander, and David I. we scarcely see any other witnesses than Saxons, who enjoyed under those monarchs all power, and acquired vast possessions in every district of Scotland, settling with their followers in entire hamlets. If this English origin of Scotch be correct, it sufficiently accounts for the Scottish poets, in the fifteenth century, speaking of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, as their masters and models of style, and extolling them as the improvers of a language to which they prefix the word " our," as if it belonged in common to Scots and English, and even sometimes denominating their own language English. Yet, in whatever light we are to regard Lowland Scotch, whether merely as northern English, or as having a mingled Gothic origin from the Pictish and Anglo-Saxon, its claims to poetical antiquity are respectable. The extreme antiquity of the elegy on Alexander III. on which Mr. Ellis rests so much importance, is indeed disputed; but Sir Tristrem exhibits an original romance, composed on the north of the Tweed, at a time when there is no proof that southern English contained any work of that species of fiction, that was not translated from the French. In the fourteenth century, Barbour celebrated the greatest royal hero of his country (Bruce), in a versified romance, that is not uninteresting. The next age is prolific in the names of distinguished Scottish "Makers." Henry the Minstrel, said to have been blind from his birth, rehearsed the exploits of Wallace in strains of fierce though vulgar fire. James I. of Scotland; Henrysone, the author of Robene and Makyne, the first known pastoral, and one of the best, in a dialect rich with the favours of the pastoral muse; Douglas, the translator of Virgil; Dunbar, Mersar, and others, gave a poetical lustre to Scotland, in the fifteenth century, and fill up a space in the annals of British poetry, after the date of Chaucer and Lydgate, that is otherwise nearly barren. James I. had an elegant and tender vein, and the ludicrous pieces ascribed to him possess considerable comic humour. Douglas's descriptions of natural scenery are extolled by T. Warton, who has given ample and interpreted specimens of them, in his History of English Poetry. He was certainly a fond painter of nature; but his imagery is redundant and tediously profuse. His chief original work is the elaborate and quaint allegory of King Hart*. It is full of alliteration, a trick which the Scottish poets might have learnt to avoid from the "rose of rhetours" (as they call him) Chaucer; but in which they rival the anapæstics of Langland. Dunbar is a poet of a higher order. His tale of the Friars of Berwick is quite in the spirit of Chaucer. His Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins through Hell, though it would be absurd to compare it with the beauty and refinement of the celebrated Ode on the Passions, has yet an animated picturesqueness not unlike that of Collins. The effect of both pieces shows how much more potent allegorical figures become by being made to fleet suddenly before the imagination, than by being detained in its view by prolonged description. Dunbar conjures up the personified Sins, as Collins does the Passions, to rise, to strike, and disappear. They "come like shadows, so depart." In the works of those northern makers of the fifteenth century+, there is a gay spirit, and an indication of jovial manners, which forms a contrast to the covenanting national character of *In which the human heart is personified as a Sovereign in his castle, guarded by the five Senses, made captive by Dame Pleasaunce, a neighbouring potentate, but finally brought back from thraldom by Age and Experience. The writings of some of those Scottish poets belong to the sixteenth century; but from the date of their births they are placed under the fifteenth. C |