me, Lady, from hell pine;
Shield me, Lady, from villainy
And from all wicked company.'

By the side of this religious verse is there any need to quote more than
a stanza from the _Nut Brown Maid_ just to remind us what the secular
poets could do?

'Be it right or wrong, these men among, on women do complain,
Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vain
To love them well; for never a del they love a man again;
For let a man do what he can their favour to attain,
Yet if a new to them pursue their first true lover than
Laboureth for nought and from her thought he is a banished man.'

To say that English poetry was dead when verse like this was being
written is absurd. It was not dead, but banished from court.

We may well grumble at the mischance which has preserved to us such
quantities of the verse of men like Lydgate and Hawes, with which,
despite all the blandishments of their editors, a not unwise world
refuses to concern itself, and on the other hand has permitted to
perish, or scattered seemingly beyond retrieving, the humbler poetry
which has much greater worth. In the Robin Hood Ballads which Professor
Arber has printed from an edition by Wynkyn de Worde we have at least
one piece of salvage. It must be owned, indeed, that to claim a ballad
as the product of any one century is rather rash, and that in some form
or another this cycle was probably in existence before Chaucer died. The
'Ballad of Otterburn,' again, is founded on an incident of border war
which took place in 1388 when Chaucer had just begun work on the
_Canterbury Tales_, and this also belongs to fourteenth-century
tradition. But both the one and the other, and still more certainly
'Chevy Chace,' must be reckoned in their present form to the credit of
our period, and form a notable reinforcement to it, though we must
regret that the early transcribers and printers took so little trouble
to preserve a correct text.

Christmas carols again, as likely to be handed down from mouth to mouth
in the same way as ballads, can be assigned neither to any single author
nor to any precise year or even decade of composition. But the charming
examples which I have picked out from a number transcribed by Professor
Fluegel from a Balliol College manuscript of the middle of the sixteenth
century, may all safely be attributed to a date earlier than 1500,
though perhaps not very much earlier, and in their simple tenderness and
mirth th