Then I found another craftsman of this curious time. A little way farther on, near by to a lordly house standing in wide stretches of meadow and park lands, a most plaintive sound came from a thicket lying open to the sun. Such a dismal moaning enlisted my compassion, for here, I thought, is some luckless wight just dying or, at least, in bitterest extremity of sorrow: so I approached, stepping lightly round the blossoming thicket—peering this way and that, and now down on my hands and knees to look under the bushes, and now on tiptoe, craning my neck that I might see over, and so, presently, I found the source of the sighs and moans. It was a young man of most dainty proportions, with soft, fine-combed hair upon his pretty sloping shoulders, his sleeves so long they trailed upon the moss, his shoes laced with golden threads and toed and tasseled in monstrous fashion. A most delicate perfume came from him: his clothes were greener than grass in springtime, turned back, and puffed with damask. In his hand he had a scroll whereon now and again he looked, and groaned in most plaintive sort.
“Why, man,” I asked, “what ails you? Why that dreadful moaning? What are you, and what is yon scroll?” So absorbed was he, however, it was only when I had walked all round him to spy the wound, if it might be, that he suffered from, and finally stood directly in his sunshine, repeating the question, that he looked up.
“Interrupter of inspiration! Hast thou asked what I am, and what this is?”
“Yes; and more than once.”
“Fie! not to see! I am a minstrel—a bard; my Lord’s favorite poet up at yonder castle, and this is an ode to his mistress’s eyebrows. I was in travail of a rhyme when thy black shadow fell upon the page.”
“Give me the leaf! Why, it is the sickliest stuff that ever did dishonor to virgin paper! There, take it back,” I said, angry to find so many fools abroad, “and listen to me! You may be a poet, for I have no experience of them, but as I am a man thou art not a bard! You a bard! You the likeness and descendant of Howell ap Griffith and a hundred other Saxon gleemen! You one of the guild of Gryffith ap Conan—you a scop or a skald!—why, boy, they could write better stuff than thou canst though they had been drunk for half a day! You a stirrer of passions—you a minstrel—you a tightener of the strong sinews of warrior hearts!—fie! for shame upon your silly trivial sonnets, your particolored suits and sweet insipid vaporings! Out, I say! Get home to thy lady’s footstool, or, by Thor and Odin, I will give thee a beating out of pure respect for noble rhyming!”
The poet did not wait to argue. I was angry and rough, and the rudest-clad champion that ever swung a flail in the cause of the muses. So he took to his heels, and as I watched that pretty butterfly aiming across the sunny meadows for his master’s portals, and stopping not for hedge or ditch, “By Hoth,” I said, laughing scornfully, “we might have been friends if he could but have writ as well as he can run!”
Then I went on again, and had not gone far, when down the road there came ambling on a mule a crafty-looking Churchman, with big wallets hanging at his saddle-bows, a portentous rosary round his neck, and bare, unwashed feet hanging stirrupless by his palfrey’s side.
“Now here’s another tradesman,” I muttered to myself, “of this most perplexing age. Heaven grant his wares are superior to the last ones! Good-morning, Father!”
“Good-morning, Son! Art going into the town to take up arms for Christ and His servant Edward?”