The incident is precisely like
Palamon's first sight of Emily in Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and almost
in the very words of Palamon, the poet addresses his lady:

"Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature
Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature?
Or are ye very Nature, the goddess,
That have depainted with your heavenly hand
This garden full of flowres as they stand?"

Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal
prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of _Venus_, _Minerva_,
and _Fortune_, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging
to Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings
to his window a spray of red gillyflowers, whose leaves are inscribed,
in golden letters, with a message of encouragement.

James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so
was the dialect of his poem, although the {45} unique MS. of it is in
the Scotch spelling. The _King's Quhair_ is somewhat overladen with
ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon
the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court
poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. The lady
who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece
to Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from
captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later
James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his
wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The
story of the murder has been told of late by D. G. Rossetti, in his
ballad, _The King's Tragedy_.

The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very
spirit of romance.

The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of
literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland
English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century
were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model
to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be
translated from the French, homilies and saints' legends and rhyming
chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and
Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to
prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again
slipped {46} back into the chaos of diale