them.
The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high
sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which
have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works,
as the _Court of Love_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the _Cuckow and the
Nightingale_, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later
writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first
two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor
pieces, such as the _Boke of the Duchesse_ and the _Parlament of
Foules_.

Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who,
in his _Governail of Princes_, a didactic poem translated from the
Latin {43} about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of
his MS. a colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent,"

"This londes verray tresour and richesse,
Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable
Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse
Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse
Of Rhetoryk."

Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a
Benedictine monk, of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very
prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the _Story of Thebes_,
as an addition to the _Canterbury Tales_. His ballad of _London
Lyckpenny_, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the
law courts at Westminster in search of justice,

"But for lack of mony I could not speede,"

is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.

Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was
carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of
eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of State. There he
wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos,
entitled the _King's Quhair_ (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven lined
stanza which had been employed by Lydgate in his _Falls of Princes_
(from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called {44} the "rime royal,"
from its use by King James, The _King's Quhair_ tells how the poet, on
a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the
castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with

"The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper."

He was listening to "the little sweete nightingale," when suddenly
casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once
his "heart became her thrall."