th birdes rown';[2]

or as

'Blow, northern wind,
Send thou me my sweeting';

of which the lightness and spontaneity are represented in only a few
snatches in Chaucer. Other touches of the spring he has, for no man
better loved the merry month of May, and he has sung it until he has
become for ever identified with it in our minds. All the same, he
represents also a reaction which sees the humorous side of the lover's
springtide longings, and views all things very much as they are, without
illusion. Fortunately, in Chaucer's case this prosaic mood was raised
and transfigured by the revelation of Italian poetry, which enabled him
to give us in _Troilus and Cressida_, and the knight's tale of _Palamon
and Arcite_, the most perfect harmony of humour and romance English
narrative poetry has produced. No other poet of his time came under the
same influences, and to this fact, as well as to his possession of
genius, he owes his unique position.

That the worthy Lydgate and Hoccleve, without any of Chaucer's good
luck, failed to tread in his footsteps, is thus hardly surprising. They
took from him as much of his machinery as they could carry, wrote in his
metres with the aid of ears sadly confused by the rapidly weakening
pronunciation of final _-e_ and _-es_, and began the attempt, pursued
all through the century, to make up by magniloquence what they lacked in
poetry. This attempt was not confined to England. In France also there
was the same invasion of long words, and it took our fair neighbour much
longer to get rid of them. As the fifteenth century progressed and its
successor began, it became more and more the object of the poetaster to
end his lines with sounding polysyllables, and verse not written in this
style was regarded as uncourtly and undignified. When we once realise
that this particular experiment in language was one which had to be
made, and that our fifteenth-century poets made it with all their might,
we can understand how Hawes could hail Lydgate as 'the most dulcet
spring of famous rhetoric' (this new poetry being essentially
rhetorical); how Skelton, after condescendingly praising Chaucer for the
'pleasant, easy and plain' terms in which he wrote, hastened to explain
that Lydgate's efforts were 'after a higher rate'; and how the same
Skelton thought it necessary in his _Phylyp Sparowe_ to make his 'young
maid' excuse herself for her ignorance of 'polished terms' and 'English
words elect.' Ever