[54] Edited by Dr. Reinhold Pauli, London, 1857. Henry Morley (Eng. Writers, IV., p. 238) enumerates a score or more of existing MSS. of the poem. The first printed edition was that of Caxton, 1483.
[55] A more modern and accepted translation—by a wealthy Welsh gentleman, Thos. Johnes—was luxuriously printed on his private press at Hafod, Cardiganshire, in 1803.
[56] There is a manuscript copy in the (so-called) Bibliothèque du Roi at Paris. A certain number—among them, the Espinette Amoureuse—appear in the Buchon edition of the Chroniques; Paris, 1835.
[57] John Lydgate: dates of birth and death unsettled.
[58] The Storie of Thebe and the Troy booke were among his ambitious works. Skeat gives his epoch “about 1420,” and cites London Lickpenny—copying from the Harleian MS. (367) in the British Museum.
[59] James I. (of Scotland), b. 1394 and was murdered 1437.
The King’s Quair, from which quotation is made, was written in 1423. It is a poem of nearly 1400 lines, of which only one MS. exists—in the Bodleian Library.
An edition by Chalmers (1824) embodies many errors: the only trustworthy reading is that edited by the Rev. Walter Skeat for the Scottish Text Soc. (1883-4). A certain modernizing belongs of course to the citation I make—as well as to many others I have made and shall make.
[60] Priest at Diss in Norfolk, b. (about) 1460; d. 1529. Best edition of works edited by Rev. A. Dyce, 1843.
[61] Bedford (when Regent of France) is supposed to have transported to England the famous Louvre Library of Charles V. (of France). There were 910 vols., according to the catalogue drawn up by Gilles Mallet—“the greater number written on fine vellum and magnificently bound.”