s of whose souls he prays at the close of his
poem, "The King's Quair." That most charming of love-allegories, in
which the Scottish king sings the story of his captivity and of his
deliverance by the sweet messenger of love, not only closely imitates
Chaucer in detail, more especially at its opening, but is pervaded by
his spirit. Many subsequent Scottish poets imitated Chaucer, and some
of them loyally acknowledged their debts to him. Gawin Douglas in his
"Palace of Honour," and Henryson in his "Testament of Cressid" and
elsewhere, are followers of the southern master. The wise and brave
Sir David Lyndsay was familiar with his writings; and he was not only
occasionally imitated, but praised with enthusiastic eloquence by
William Dunbar, that "darling of the Scottish Muses," whose poetical
merits Sir Walter Scott, from some points of view, can hardly be said
to have exaggerated, when declaring him to have been "justly raised to
a level with Chaucer by every judge of poetry, to whom his obsolete
language has not rendered him unintelligble." Dunbar knew that this
Scottish language was but a form of that which, as he declared, Chaucer
had made to "surmount every terrestrial tongue, as far as midnight is
surmounted by a May morning."

Meanwhile, in England, the influence of Chaucer continued to live even
during the dreary interval which separates from one another two
important epochs of our literary history. Now, as in the days of the
Norman kings, ballads orally transmitted were the people's poetry; and
one of these popular ballads carried the story of "Patient Grissel"
into regions where Chaucer's name was probably unknown. When, after
the close of the troubled season of the Roses, our Poetic literature
showed the first signs of a revival, they consisted in a return to the
old masters of the fourteenth century. The poetry of Hawes, the
learned author of the crabbed "Pastime of Pleasure," exhibits an
undeniable continuity with that of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, to
which triad he devotes a chapter of panegyric. Hawes, however, presses
into the service of his allegory not only all the Virtues and all the
Vices, whom from habit we can tolerate in such productions, but also
Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic, and the rest of the seven Daughters of
Doctrine, whom we CANNOT; and is altogether inferior to the least of
his models. It is at the same time to his credit that he seems
painfully aware of his inability to cope