of womanhood in the Garment of Good Ladies; a poem of the same type as those thoughtful lyrics which describe what is best in certain phases of professions, or life, such as Sir H. Wotton's Character of a Happy Life, or Wordsworth's Happy Warrior.

But among lesser men, whom we need not mention, the greatest is WILLIAM DUNBAR. He carries the influence of Chaucer on to the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. Few have possessed a more masculine genius, and his work was as varied in its range as it was original. He followed the form and plan of Chaucer in his two poems of The Thistle and the Rose, 1503, and The Golden Terge, 1508, the first on the marriage of James IV. to Margaret Tudor, the second an allegory of Love, Beauty, Reason, and the Poet. In both, though they begin with Chaucer's conventional May morning, the natural description becomes Scottish, and in both the national enthusiasm of the poet is strongly marked. But he soon ceased to imitate. The vigorous fun of the satires and of the satirical ballads that he wrote is matched only by their coarseness, a coarseness and a fun that descended to Burns. Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still higher in a wild poem in which he personifies the seven deadly sins, and describes their dance, with a mixture of horror and humor which makes the little thing unique.

A man almost as remarkable as Dunbar is GAWIN DOUGLAS, Bishop of Dunkeld, who died in 1522, at the Court of Henry VIII., and was buried in the Savoy. He is the author of the first metrical English translation from the original of any Latin book. He translated Ovid's Art of Love, and afterwards, with truth and spirit, the Eneid of Vergil, 1513. To each book of the Eneid he wrote a prologue of his own. And it is chiefly by these that he takes rank among the Scottish poets. Three of them are descriptions of the country in May, in autumn, and in winter. The scenery is altogether Scotch, and the few Chaucerisms that appear seem absurdly

out of place in a picture of nature which is as close as if it had been done by Keats in his early time. The color is superb, the landscape is described with an excessive detail, but the poem is not composed by any art into a whole. Still it astonishes the reader, and it is only by bringing in the Celtic element of love of nature that we can account for. the vast distance between work like this and contemporary work in England such as Skelton's. Of Douglas's other original work, one poem, The Palace of Honour, 1501, continues the influence of Chaucer.

There were a number of other Scottish poets belonging to this time who are all remembered and praised by SIR DAVID LYNDSAY, whom it is best to mention in this place, because he still connects Scottish poetry with Chaucer. He was born about 1490 and is the last of the old Scottish school, and the most popular. He is the most popular, because he is not only the Poet but also the Reformer. His poem, The Dreme, 1528, connects him with Chaucer. It is in the manner of the old poet. But its scenery is Scottish, and, instead of the May morning of Chaucer, it opens on a winter's day of wind and sleet. The place is a cave over the sea, whence Lyndsay sees the weltering of the waves. Chaucer goes to sleep over Ovid or Cicero, Lyndsay falls into dream as he thinks of the 'false world's instability' wavering like the sea waves. The difference marks not only the difference of the two countries, but the different natures of the men. Chaucer did not care much for the popular storms, and loved the Court more than the Commonweal. Lyndsay in the Dreme, and in two other poems-the Complaint to the King, and the Testament of the King's Papyngo-is absorbed in the evils and sorrows of the people, and in the desire to reform the abuses of the Church, of the Court, of party, of the nobility.

In 1539 his Satire of the Three Estates, a Morality interspersed with interludes, was represented before James V. at Linlithgow. It was first acted in 1535, and was a daring attack

on the ignorance, profligacy, and exactions of the priesthood, on the vices and flattery of the favorites-'a mocking of abuses used in the country by diverse sorts of estate.' A still bolder poem, and one thought so even by himself, is the Monarchie, 1553, his last work. Reformer as he was, he was more a social and political than a religious one. He bears the same relation to Knox as Langland did to Wiclif. When he was sixty-five years old, he saw the fruits of his work. Ecclesiastical councils met to reform the Church. But the reform soon went beyond his temperate wishes. In 1557 the Reformation in Scotland was fairly launched when in December the Congregation signed the Bond of Association. Lyndsay had died three years before; he is as much the reformer as he is the poet, of a transition time. Still his verse hath charms,' but it was neither sweet nor imaginative. He had genuine satire, great moral breadth, much preaching power in verse, coarse, broad humor in plenty, and more dramatic power and invention than the rest of his fellows, and he lived an active, bold, and brave life in a very stormy time."

LESSON 16.

POETRY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF CHAUCER." We shall speak in this and in the next two paragraphs only of the poets in England whose work was due to the publication of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate by Caxton. After a short revival that influence died, and a new one entered from Italy into English verse in the poems of Surrey and Wyatt. The transition period between the one influence and the other is of great interest. We see how the old poets had been neglected by the way in which the new poets speak of them as of something wonderful, and by the indignant reproach a man like Hawes makes when he says that people care for nothing but ballads, and will not read these old books. But the reproach was unwise. It is better for the interests of literature to make a new ballad than to read an

old poem, and the ballads of England kept up the original vein of poetry. It is one of the signs of a new poetic life in a nation when it is fond of poetry which, like the ballad, has to do with the human interests of the present: and, when that kind of human poetry pleases the upper classes as well as the lower, a resurrection of poetry is at hand.

HAWES AND SKELTON.-At such a time we are likely to find imitators of the old work, and in the reign of Henry VII. STEPHEN HAWES recast a poem of Lydgate's (?) The Temple of Glass, and imitated Chaucer's work and the old allegory in his Pastime of Pleasure, 1506. We shall also find men who, while they still follow the old, leave it for an original line, because they are more moved by human life in the present. than in the past. Their work will be popular, it may even resemble the form of the ballad. Such a man was JOHN SKELTON, who wrote in Henry VII.'s and in Henry VIII.'s reign, and died, 1529. His earliest poems were after the manner of Chaucer, but he soon took a manner of his own, and, being greatly excited by the cry of the people for Church reformation, wrote a bitter satire on Wolsey for his pride, and on the clergy for their luxury. His poem, Why come ye not to Court? was a fierce satire on the great Cardinal. That of Colin Clout was the cry of the country Colin, and of the Clout or mechanic of the town, against the corruption of the Church.

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Both are written in short, rude, rayling rimes, pleasing only the popular ear,' and Skelton chose them for that purpose. Both have a rough, impetuous power; their language is coarse, full even of slang, but Skelton could use any language he pleased. He was an admirable scholar. Erasmus calls him the glory and light of English letters,' and Caxton says that he improved our language. Colin Clout represents the whole popular feeling of the time just before the movement of the Reformation took a new turn by the opposition of the Pope to Henry's divorce. It was not only

in this satirical vein that Skelton wrote. We owe to him some pretty and new love lyrics; and the Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, which tells the grief of a nun, called Jane Scrope, for the death of her sparrow, is one of the gayest and most inventive poems in the language. Skelton stands quite alone between the last flicker of the influence of Chaucer, whose last true imitator he was, and the rise of a new Italian influence in England in the poems of Surrey and Wyatt. In his own special work he was entirely original, and, standing thus between two periods of poetry, he is a kind of landmark in English literature. The Ship of Fooles, 1508, by BARCLAY, is of this time, but it has no value. It is a recast of a work published at Basel, and was popular because it attacked the follies and questions of the time. It was written in Chaucer's stanza.

ITALIAN INFLUENCE-WYATT AND SURREY.-While poetry under Skelton and Lyndsay became an instrument of reform, it revived as an art at the close of Henry VIII.'s reign in SIR THOMAS WYATT and the EARL OF SURREY. They were both Italian travellers, and, in taking back to England the inspiration they had gained from Petrarca, they 1-made English poetry. They are the first really modern English poets; the first who have anything of the modern manner. Though Italian in sentiment, their language is more English than Chaucer's is, they use fewer romance words. They handed down this purity of English to the Elizabethan poets, to Sackville, Spenser, and Shakespeare. They introduced a new kind of poetry, the amourist poetry. The 'AMOURISTS,' as they are called, were poets who composed poems on the subject of love-sonnets mingled with lyrical pieces after the manner of Petrarca, and in accord with the love philosophy he built on Plato. The Hundred Passions of WATSON, the sonnets of Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Drummond are all poems of this kind, and the same impulse in a similar form appears in the sonnets of Rosetti and Mrs. Browning of our time.