Again, when the Chronicle reaches King Richard II., I have embraced the opportunity to show you the kind of English which was spoken in Froissart’s time, by adding to one of the chapters the robust “Ballad sent to King Richard” by Geoffrey Chaucer,—begging you to believe that our time cries out to every young American man, as Chaucer to his prince, to
“Do law, love truth and worthiness,
And wed thy folk again to steadfastness.”
Finally, do not think that to read this book is to exhaust Froissart. Only about one-ninth of his Chronicle could be got into the space here assigned; and you have the comfort of knowing that there is a great deal more.
To him, then; and I envy every one of you!
“For herein,”—as old William Caxton, the first English printer, says in his Prologue to Sir Thomas Malory’s history of King Arthur,—“for herein may be seen chyvalrye, curtosye, humanyte, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, synne. Doo after the good, and leve the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee.”
Sidney Lanier
Baltimore, Md., 1879.