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 back
into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer.

In the history of every literature the development of prose is later
than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is
cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage of
society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought worthy of
being written and kept. English prose labored under the added
disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan tongue
and the medium of communication between scholars of all countries. Latin
was the language of the Church, and in the Middle Ages churchman and
scholar were convertible terms. The word _clerk_ meant either priest or
scholar. Two of the _Canterbury Tales_ are in prose, as is also the
_Testament of Love_, formerly ascribed to Chaucer, and the style of all
these is so feeble, wandering, and unformed that it is hard to believe
that they were written by the same man who wrote the _Knight's Tale_ and
the story of Griselda. _The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John
Maundeville_--the forerunner of that great library of oriental travel
which has enriched our modern literature--was wr