rotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness
of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after
death. Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous
barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from
a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional
grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished is, for example,
_A Luve Ron_ (A Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales,
one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon's _Balade of Dead
Ladies_, with its refrain.

"Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?"
"Where are the snows of yester year?
Where is Paris and Heleyne
That weren so bright and fair of blee[1]
Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne
Yseude and alle the,[2]
Hector with his sharpe main,
And Caesar rich in worldes fee?
They beth ygliden out of the reign[3]
As the shaft is of the dee." [4]

A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of
mention, among others, _The Owl and the Nightingale_, generally
assigned to the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an _Estrif_, {26} or
dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale
the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much
animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. _The Land of
Cokaygne_ is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines,
belonging to the class of _fabliaux_, short humorous tales or satirical
pieces in verse. It describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where
the geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the
bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of
sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the
hall of little King Pepin, are "of pie-crust and pastry crust," with
flouren cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins.

There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a
single collection (Harl, MS., 2253), which are almost the only English
verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are
written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes
have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical,
fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty. They celebrate the
gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and
woodruff.

"When the nightingale sings the woodes waxen green