But let us not blame him; Chaucer, his good master, would, he assures us, have excused his faulty prosody, and what right have we to be more severe than Chaucer?[843] To this there is, of course, nothing to answer, but then if we cannot answer, at least we can leave. We can go and visit the other chief poet of the time, Thomas Hoccleve; he does not live far off, the journey will be a short one; we have but to call at the next door.
This other poet is a public functionary; he is a clerk of the Privy Seal[844]; his duties consist in copying documents; an occupation he finds at length somewhat tiresome.[845] By way of diversion he frequents taverns; women wait on him there, and he kisses them; a wicked deed, he admits; but he goes no further; at least so he assures us, being doubtless held back by a remembrance of officialdom and promotion.[846] At all events this little was even too much, for we soon find him sick unto death, rhyming supplications to the god of health, and to Lord Fournivall, another kind of god, very useful to propitiate, for he was Lord Treasurer. He writes a good many detached pieces in which, thanks to his mania for talking about himself, he makes us acquainted with the nooks and corners of the old city, thus supplying rare and curious information, treasured by the historian. He composes, in order to make himself noticed by the king, a lengthy poem on the Government of Princes, "De Regimine Principum," which is nothing but a compilation taken from three or four previous treatises; he adds a prologue, and in it, following the example of Gower, he abuses all classes of society. He does not fail to begin his confession over again: from which we gather that he is something of a drunkard and of a coward, that he is vain withal and somewhat ill-natured.
He had, however, one merit, and, in spite of his defects, all lovers of literature ought to be grateful to him; the best of his works is not his Government of Princes; it is a drawing. He not only, like Lydgate, loved and mourned Chaucer, but wished to keep the memory of his features, and he caused to be painted on the margin of a manuscript the portrait mentioned above, which agrees so well with the descriptions contained in the writings of the master that there is no doubt as to the likeness.[847]
II.
Let us cross the hills, and we shall still find Chaucer; as in England, so is he wept and imitated in Scotland. But the poets live there in a different atmosphere; the imitation is not so close a one; a greater proportion of a Celtic blood maintains differences; more originality survives; the decline is less apparent. The best poets of English tongue, "Inglis" as they call it, "oure Inglis," Dunbar says, are, in the fifteenth century, Scots. Among them are a king, a monk, a schoolmaster, a minstrel, a bishop.
The king is James I., son of Robert III., of the family of those Stuarts nearly all of whom were destined to the most tragic fate. This one, taken at sea by the English, when only a child, remained nineteen years confined in various castles. Like a knight of romance, and a personage in a miniature, he shortened the hours of his captivity by music, reading, and poetry; the works of Chaucer and Gower filled him with admiration. Then he found a better comfort for his sorrows; this knight of miniature and of romance saw before him one day the maiden so often painted by illuminators, the one who appears amidst the flowers and the dew, Aucassin's Nicolette, the Emily of the Knight's Tale, the one who brings happiness. She appeared to the king, not in a dream but in reality; her name was Jane Beaufort, she was the daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and great grand-daughter of John of Gaunt. In her family, too, there were many tragic destinies; her brother was killed at the battle of St. Albans; her three nephews perished in the Wars of the Roses; her grand-nephew won the battle of Bosworth and became king Henry VII. A mutual love sprang up between the two young people, and when James was able to return to Scotland he took back with him his queen of romance, whom he had wedded before the altar of St. Mary Overy's, next to the grave of one of his literary masters, the poet Gower.
His reign lasted thirteen years, and they were thirteen years of struggle: vain endeavours to regulate and centralise a kingdom composed of independent clans, all brave and ready for foreign wars, but quite as ready, too, for civil ones. Assisted by his queen of romance, the knightly poet displayed in this task an uncommon energy, and was, with all his faults, one of the best kings of Scotland. He had many children; one of his daughters became dauphiness of France, and another duchess of Brittany. Towards the end of 1436, he had so many enemies among the turbulent chieftains that sinister prophecies began to circulate; one of them announced the speedy death of a king; and as he played at chess on Christmas eve with a knight surnamed the "king of love," he said to him: "There are no other kings in Scotland save me and you; I take heed to myself, do you likewise." But the king of love had nothing to fear. During the night of the 20th of February, 1437, an unwonted noise was suddenly heard in the courtyard of the monastery of Perth where James lodged; it was Robert Graham and his rebel band. Vainly did the king offer resistance, though unarmed; the foe were too numerous, and they stretched him dead, pierced with sixteen sword wounds.
The constant love of the king for Jane Beaufort had been celebrated by himself in an allegorical poem, imitated from Chaucer: "The King's Quhair," a poem all aglow with bright hues and with the freshness of youth.[848] The prince is in bed at night, and, like Chaucer in his poem of the Duchess, unable to sleep, he takes up a book. It is the "Consolation" of Boethius, and the meditations of "that noble senatoure" who had also known great reverses, occupied his thoughts while the night hours glided on. The silence is broken by the matin bell:
Bot now, how trowe ye? suich a fantasye
Fell me to mynd, that ay me-thoght the bell
Said to me: "Tell on, man, quhat the befell."
And the king, invoking Clio and Polymnia, like Chaucer, and adding Tysiphone whom he takes for a Muse, because he is less familiar with mythology than Chaucer, tells what befell him, how he parted with his friends, when quite a boy, was imprisoned in a foreign land, and from the window of his tower discovered one day in the garden: