Carols. and in the more beautiful strangeness of Bonnie Annie, which describes how the ship's captain is forced to cast his sweetheart overboard with his own hands, the crew holding that she brings the ship ill-luck : 6 He has ta'en her in his arms twa, lo, lifted her cannie, He has thrown her out owre-board, his ain dear Annie. The corse it did float, the ship it did follow, Until that they came to the high banks of Yarrow. 'O I'd bury my love on the high banks of Yarrow But the wood it is dear and the planks they are narrow.' He made his love a coffin o' the gowd sae yellow, These extracts, together with the more highly wrought ones previously quoted, will show how utterly different the early anonymous ballads are from the sophisticated modern variety of definite authorship. Their spell lies, above all things, in their utter freedom from self-consciousness; and it is just here that The Daemon Lover and The Laily Worm differ from The Ancient Mariner, where the art is as self-conscious as it is consummate. Despite its wildness and wonder, there is little of the old ballad touch in this: The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Around, about, in reel and rout, The death fires danced at night; Burnt green and blue and white. Even where modern ballads are written by a master expressly on the older pattern, they will hardly deceive the initiated. Swinburne's posthumous ballads were written avowedly as such imitations; but for all their plausibility they out-Herod Herod their licence is too licentious, too studiously irregular, to convince. We have seen that the ballad is closely connected in its origin with the carole or round dance, and this connexion gives it kinship with the anonymous lyric poetry of the period, much of which is very beautiful. Most notable of all are the carols, which owe their name, and something of their nature, to the dance just mentioned. Carols had been brought to England from France as early as the twelfth century, and were probably freely composed in English throughout the thirteenth; but the finest and fullest collection of them is to be found in certain fifteenth-century manuscripts, most notably in the Sloane and the Bodleian (Eng. Poet E. 1). They have sometimes been attributed to the minstrels, but it is more probable that their authors were clerks, although, likely enough, clerks 6 of the errant persuasion'.1 Their suggested origin in the folk song and pagan festival cannot be discussed here. Most of them show a lifting of the gloom which is so common in the earlier mediaeval religious poetry, and is doubtless a survival from Anglo-Saxon times. This new cheerfulness is due in part to their French origin, in part to the natural joy of the Christmas festival. It is often spiritual, as in There is no rose of swich vertu As is the rose that bare Jhesu: For in this rose conteined was The aungels sungen, the schepherds to, Gaudeamus. It appears in a quieter form in 'I sing of a maiden that is makeless', the most exquisite of all the carols, and one of the most exquisite of all English religious poems. It recurs, often very charmingly, in the lullabies which spring naturally from the theme of Mary's motherhood: Mary mother, I am thy child Thogh I be laid in stall, Lordes and dukes shall worship me And so shall kingës all. Ye shall well see that kingës three For this behest give me thy brest, The spiritual exaltation of the season passes, in some cases, The boar's head in hand bring I, There were also many secular poems in praise of drinking and Songs of revelry: I care right nought, I take no thought For clothes to keep me warm; Have I good drink, I surely think Nothing can do me harm. For truly than I fear no man Be he never so bold, When I am armed and throughly warmed With jolly good ale and old. Henry VIII wrote several poems of good-fellowship and 1 E. K. Chambers, Some Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric, Revelry and Love. Lack of love which survive in the song-book bearing his name. Many English love-lyrics of the period derive from such French forms as the pastourelle, the ballade, and the aube, or song of the lover against dawn, familiar to all in Romeo and Juliet. There are also invectives against women, of the type which became familiar in the later broadside ballads. Other poems of moral counsel' bring the eternal note of sadness in ': Earth upon earth would be a king; But how earth to earth shall, thinks he no thing: CHAPTER IX MISCELLANEOUS PROSE-PECOCK TO MALORY Lack of tradition in prose-Pecock, Capgrave, Caxton, Berners, IN prose, as in poetry, the fifteenth century was a period of Tradition no very momentous achievement. The fourteenth century had in Prose. supplied it with no foundation on which a great prose literature might be built. Only after a hard struggle had the language of England made good its right to express the thought and feelings of Englishmen; and that right, even when won, was by no means unchallenged. The vernacular, owing to its lack of high tradition and its consequent uncertainty of form, was rejected by many in favour of Latin as a means of learned expression. In poetry Chaucer had set a tradition which, however interrupted and misunderstood, showed all men that English metre was capable of great and various things. In prose, despite the sudden glory of Mandeville, there had been no such tradition; and although in the following century certain writers strove to create one, there could obviously, as yet, be no such succession of finished work as was to follow in such an age as Dryden's. Pecock. Certain writings, however, are important as showing signs of effort and transition. Toward the middle of the century Reginald Pecock (1395-1460), Bishop of St. Asaph, and subsequently of Chichester, published his Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy, a work intended as a counterblast to the Lollards, but ultimately condemned by those in authority as heretical. His arguments do not concern us here: what does concern us greatly is that, like Wyclif, he deliberately chose English for the purpose of theological argument, and that his handling of it is clear and cogent. The vernacular at this period was necessarily lacking in technical terms fit to express logical and theological conceptions. Pecock set himself, with great ingenuity and will, to supply such terminology, giving contemporary words a fresh meaning, reviving archaisms, and coining new words, both from Teutonic and Latin sources. His prose, if it lacks finish, is at least forcible and various. More simple in style, as less technical in subject, is the Chronicle of England, the chief prose work in English of John Capgrave (1393-1464), friar of Lynn in Norfolk. Capgrave's Capgrave. English is terse and fairly workmanlike, but it lacks colour and distinction, and the native vigour to be found in the chief work of Sir John Fortescue (1394 ?-1476 ?), Chief Justice of England under Henry VI. In_The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, Fortescue adapts the vernacular for legal disquisition, as Pecock had adapted it for theological: yet his book is by no means merely technical: it contains much general comment on the social conditions of the time, and a very lively passage contrasting the characteristics of the French and English nations, much to the detriment of the former. It is impossible here to deal in detail with the many minor treatises of the period, and with such collections of letters as that recording the interesting, but by no means always edifying, doings and ambitions of the Paston family. Two of the greatest writers of the period are translators. Their work shows two things in chief-first, that they recognized the deficiencies of English when compared with languages backed by an older tradition; and second, that they were determined to draw upon such languages in order to make these deficiencies good. The position of one of these men, William Caxton (1425-1491), gave him special opportunities for Caxton. realizing his desire. In 1476 he set up his famous press at Westminster, and thence continued to issue volumes till the year of his death. It has been claimed, with some justice, that he directed rather than followed the literary taste of his day; but his direction must have been in large measure conditioned by the response he expected, and we may therefore take his publications, and those of his successors, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde, as fairly indicating the general reading of the age. Caxton, like all thinking men of his day, had the keenest admiration for Chaucer, and he showed this by printing the Canterbury Tales; but the books issued from his press are, for the most part, prose, and include devotional and didactic treatises, romances, and histories, freely blended, in general, with legend. About a third of his whole output consists of translations made either by himself or under his immediate direction. The earliest of these-the earliest book, indeed, printed in the English language-is the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, in the preface of which he admits frankly, and with pardonable envy, the superiority of the French tongue at this period to the English. A more popular and considerable translation is the one made by him from the Latin and French versions of the Golden Legend, that mediaeval storehouse of wonder, piety, and saintly biography. His paraphrase, or very free adaptation, of the Aeneid became, as we have seen, an Berners. object of scorn to Gavin Douglas. Caxton's other translations include The Knight of the Town, Reynard the Fox, The Four Sons of Aymon, and The History of Godfrey of Boulogne. Through his choice of subjects he certainly did much to perpetuate the taste for romances, though it is significant of the times that he rejects the waning type written in alliterative verse for the more fashionable variety derived from French prose. His style, which appears most distinctively in the very instructive prefaces to his different publications, alternates curiously between the natural simplicity of the language at this period, and the ornateness by which, quite consciously and explicitly, he strove to give that language dignity. If his prose has seldom the beauty so constant in Malory, its more direct passages are admirably vigorous; and its occasional defects of involution and cumbrousness are those of one striving toward a richer and nobler structure. The same ornateness, due to the same striving, is evident in certain works of another great translator, John Bourchier, Lord Berners (1467-1533); but Berners' prose at its best has a tact and music beyond Caxton's compass. His finest and longest and most famous work is his translation of the Chronicles of Froissart, which was issued from Pynson's press between 1523 and 1525. Berners, who had been bred in Froissart's school of action and chivalry, set about his work with enthusiasm, and did full justice to his incomparable model. His version is full of vigour and charm, and reproduces Froissart's forthright vividness, without undue aureation' or embellishment. It showed Englishmen what the French had already done in the way of heightened historical narrative, and what they might do themselves; and in its general scope and method, if not in the details of its style, it became a valued model for the Elizabethan chroniclers. Among Berners' remaining translations are two from the French, Arthur of Little Britain and Huon of Bordeaux. In the first of these he is handicapped by the crudity of his original. Huon, however, in its successive versions, had for long been one of the most popular romances in French, and despite its digressions and weakness of construction, it may still be read with pleasure in Berners' spirited English. His two remaining translations were made from French versions of Spanish originals: the first is Guevara's Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, subsequently Englished by North under the title of The Diall of Princes; the second is The Castle of Love, a romance of chivalry. Both of these in their original dress have the peculiar ornateness and artificiality which, through North and Lyly, subsequently became acclimatised in England under the name of Euphuism. Berners reproduces these qualities in his translation, and thus becomes in a sense Lyly's forerunner as a craftsman in the ornate style. Some have claimed that his general use of the ornate was not due to his natural bent or inclination, but merely to the accident which flung Guevara in his way; yet his prefaces to |