“D’ye think I did not know ye, my masters? Should I turn upon the true Prince? Why thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules; but beware instinct: I was a coward on instinct.”
So runs the Shakespearean scene, of which I give this glimpse only as a remembrancer of Henry IV., and his possibly wayward son.
If we keep by the strict letter of history, there is little of literary interest in that short reign of his—only fourteen years. Occleve, a poet of whom I spoke as having painted a portrait of Chaucer (which I tried to describe to you) is worth mentioning—were it only for this. Lydgate,[57] of about the same date, was a more fertile poet; wrote so easily indeed, that he was tempted to write too much. But he had the art of choosing taking subjects, and so, was vastly popular. He had excellent training, both English and Continental; he was a priest, though sometimes a naughty one; and he opened a school at his monastery of St. Edmunds. A few fragments of that monastery are still to be seen in the ancient town of Bury St. Edmunds:—a town you may remember in a profane way, as the scene of certain nocturnal adventures that befel, in our time, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller.
Notable amongst the minor poems of this old Bury monk, is a jingling ballad called London Lickpenny, in which a poor suitor pushing his way into London courts, is hustled about, has his hood stolen, wanders hither and yon, with stout cries of “ripe strawberries” and “hot sheepes feete” shrilling in his ears; is beset by taverners and thievish thread-sellers, and is glad to get himself away again into Kent, and there digest the broad, and ever good moral that a man’s pennies get “licked” out of him fast in London. Remembering that this was at the very epoch when Nym and Bardolph frequented the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap, and cracked jokes and oaths with Dame Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, and we are more grateful for the old rhyming priest’s realistic bit of London sights, than for all his classics,[58] or all his stories of the saints.
But at the very time this Lydgate was writing, a tenderer and sweeter voice was warbling music out of a prison window at Windsor; and the music has come down to us:[59]
“Beauty enough to make a world to doat,
And when she walkèd had a little thraw
Under the sweet grene bowis bent,
Her fair freshe face, as white as any snaw