LYDGATE; THE MONK OF BURY.
Lydgate, the monk of Bury, was also the scholar of Chaucer: our monk had not passed a whole sequestered life in his Benedictine monastery; he had journeyed through France and Italy, and was familiar with the writings of Dante, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and of Alain Chartier. The delectable catalogue of his writings, great and small, exceeds two hundred and fifty, and may not yet be complete, for they lie scattered in their manuscript state. A great multitude of writings, the incessant movements of a single mind, will at first convey to us a sense of magnitude; and in this magnitude, if we observe the greatest possible diversity of parts, and, if we may use the term, the flashings of the most changeable contrasts, we must place such a universal talent among the phenomena of literature.
Lydgate composed epics, which were the lasting favourites of two whole centuries—so long were classical repetitions of “Troy” and of “Thebes” not found irksome.[1] In his graver hours he instructed the world by ethical descants, Æsopian fables, and quaint proverbs; fixed their wonder by saintly legends and veracious chronicles; and disported in amorous ditties, and many a merrie tale: translating or inventing, labour or levity, rounded the unconscious day of the versifying monk. We descend from the “Siege of Troy,” a romance of nearly thirty thousand lines, which long graced the oriel window, to the freer vein of humour of “London Lick-penny,” which opens the street scenery of London in the fourteenth century, and “The Prioresse and her Three Wooers,” that exquisitely ludicrous narrative ballad for the people.[2]
Ritson, whose rabid hostility to the clerical character was part of his constitutional malady, whether it related to “a mendacious prelate” or “a stinking monk,” after having expended twenty pages in the mere enumeration of the titles of Lydgate’s writings, heartlessly hints at the “cart-loads of rubbish of a voluminous poetaster; a prosaic and drivelling monk.” And this is greedily seized on by the hand of the bibliographer. Percy and Ellis, too, mention Dan Lydgate with contempt. Critics often find it convenient to resemble dogs, by barking one after the other, without any other cause than the first bark of a brother, who had only bayed the moon. It now seemed concluded that the rhyming monk was to be dismissed for ever. A very credible witness, however, at last deposed that “Lydgate has been oftener abused than read.”[3] And now Mr. Hallam tells us that “Gray, no light authority, speaks more favourably of Lydgate than either Warton or Ellis;” and this nervous writer, with his accustomed correct discernment, has alleged a valid reason why Gray excelled them in this criticism; for “great poets have often the taste to discern, and the candour to acknowledge, those beauties which are latent amidst the tedious dulness of their humbler brethren.”
Warton has, however, afforded three copious chapters on Lydgate, which are half as much as his enthusiasm bestowed on Chaucer. A Gothic monk, composing ancient romances, was a subject too congenial to have been neglected by the historian of our poetry, and he has limned and illuminated the feudal priest with the love of the votary, who deemed, in his “lone-hours,”
| Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with flowers. |
His miniature is exquisitely touched. “He was not only the poet of his monastery, but of the world in general. If a disguising was intended by the company of goldsmiths, a mask before his majesty, a may-game for the sheriffs and aldermen of London, a mumming before the lord-mayor, a procession of pageants for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a carol for the coronation, Lydgate was consulted, and gave the poetry.”[4]