which was to
become one of the characteristics of the fourteenth century.

The poets who made these songs, charming as they were, rarely succeeded
however in perfectly imitating the light pace of the careless French
muse. In reading a great number of the songs of both countries, one is
struck by the difference. The English spring is mixed with winter, and
the French with summer; England sings the verses of May, remembering
April, France sings them looking forward to June.

Blow northerne wynd,
Sent thou me my suetyng,
Blow, northerne wynd, blou, blou, blou![383]

says the English poet. Contact with the new-comers had modified the
gravity of the Anglo-Saxons, but without sweeping it away wholly and for
ever: the possibility of recurring sadness is felt even in the midst of
the joy of "Merry England."

But the hour draws near when for the first time, and in spite of all
doleful notes, the joy of "Merry England" will bloom forth freely.
Edward III. is on the throne, Chaucer is just born, and soon the future
Black Prince will win his spurs at Crecy.

FOOTNOTES:

[324] "Castel of Love," "made in the latter half of the XIIIth century,"
in Horstmann and Furnivall, "Minor Poems of the Vernon MS.," E.E.T.S.,
1892, Part I. p. 356, see below, p. 213. Grosseteste had said:

... Trestuz ne poent mie
Saver le langage en fin
D'Ebreu de griu ne de latin.

(_Ibid._ p. 355.)

[325] Among the collections of English sermons from the twelfth to the
fourteenth century, see "An Old English Miscellany," ed. Morris, Early
English Text Society, 1872, 8vo; pp. 26 ff., a translation in English
prose of the thirteenth century of some of the sermons of Maurice de
Sully; p. 187, "a lutel soth sermon" in verse, with good advice to
lovers overfond of "Malekyn" or "Janekyn."--"Old English homilies and
homiletic treatises ... of the XIIth and XIIIth centuries," ed. Morris,
E.E.T.S., 1867-73, 2 vols. 8vo; prose and verse (specimens of music in
the second series); several of those pieces are mere transcripts of
Anglo Saxon works anterior to the Conquest; p. 159, the famous "Moral
Ode," twelfth century, on the transitoriness of this life: "Ich em nu
alder thene ich wes," &c., in rhymed verse (_cf._ "Old English
Miscellany," p. 58, and "Anglia," i. p. 6).--"The Ormulum, with the
notes and glossary of Dr. R. M. White," ed. R. Holt, Oxford, 1878, 2
vols. 8vo, an immense compilation in verse, of which a part only has
been