Gower, Chaucer, Occleve, and Lydgate,--not the Catechism
and Latin Grammar. It was very pleasant to come off the directions not
to conveye spetell over the table, or burnish one's bones with one's
teeth, to the burst of enthusiasm with which the writer speaks of our
old poets. He evidently believed in them with all his heart; and it
would have been a good thing for England if our educators since had
followed his example. If the time wasted, almost, in Latin and Greek by
so many middle-class boys, had been given to Milton and Shakspere,
Chaucer and Langland, with a fit amount of natural science, we should
have been a nobler nation now than we are. There is no more promising
sign of the times than the increased attention paid to English in
education now.

But to return to our author. He gives Chaucer the poet's highest gift,
Imagination, in these words,

what ever to say he toke in his entente,
his langage was so fayer & pertynante,
yt semeth vnto manys heryng
_not only the worde, but veryly the thyng_. (l. 343.)

And though the writer has the bad taste to praise Lydgate more than
Chaucer, yet we may put this down to his love for his old master, and
may rest assured that though the cantankerous Ritson calls the Bury
schoolmaster a 'driveling monk,' yet the larking schoolboy who robbed
orchards, played truant, and generally raised the devil in his early
days (_Forewords to Babees Book_, p. xliv.), retained in later years
many of the qualities that draw to a man the boy's bright heart, the
disciple's fond regret. We too will therefore hope that old Lydgate's

sowle be gon
(To) the sterred paleys above the dappled skye,
Ther to syng _Sanctus_ insessavntly
Emonge the mvses nyne celestyall,
Before the hyeste Iubyter of all. (l. 381-5.)

In old age the present poem was composed (st. 60, p. 42-3); 'a lytill
newe Instruccion' to a lytle childe, to remove him from vice & make him
follow virtue. At his riper age our author promises his boy the
surplusage of the treatise (st. 74, p. 50-1); and if a copy of it
exists, I hope it will soon fall in our way and get into type, for 'the
more the merrier' of these peeps into old boy-life.

On one of the grammatical forms of the Oriel MS., Mr Skeat writes:

"It is curious to observe the forms of the imperative mood plural which
occur so frequently throughout the poem in the Oriel copy. The forms
ending in