This is given in Furnival's Trial-Forewords to Chaucer's Minor Poems, and is especially interesting in connection with the history of the forms in English use.
Of his immediate followers, Lydgate, a monk of Bury, author of London Lyckpenny, is said by Guest to have written a "roundle," and one by Thomas Occleve is printed in Morley's Shorter English Poems.
John Gower (1340-1408), author of Confessio Amantis, at the coronation of Henry IV. presented the king with a collection of fifty Ballades, written in the Provençal manner, "to entertain his noble court." The thin oblong MS., on vellum, which contains them is still extant in the Marquis of Stafford's library at Trentham, and in 1818 it was printed for the Roxburghe Club; but as the poems are unfortunately written in French, they do not assist in supporting a claim for the early use of the form in England. Professor Henry Morley has translated one for his English Writers; it follows the rhymes accurately, but has a somewhat trite subject. A critic has well said of it, that the poets of Gowers's day "were not burdened with solving 'the riddle of the painful earth.' It may be that a good deal of their guileless delight in things fresh and young was feigned, but then so is much of our more pretentious philosophy." From its special interest it is quoted here—
Winter departs, and comes the flowery May,
And round from cold to heat the seasons fly;
The bird that to its nest had lost the way
Rebuilds it that he may rejoice thereby.
Like change in my love's world I now descry,
With such a hope I comfort myself here,
And you, my lady, on this truth rely:
When grief departs the coming joys are near.
My lady sweet, by that which now I say
You may discover how my heart leaps high,
That serves you, and has served you many a day,
As it will serve you daily till I die.
Remember, then, my lady, knowing why,
That my desire for you will never veer
As God wills that it be, so be our tie:
When grief departs the coming joys are near.
The day that news of you came where I lay,
It seem'd there was no grief could make me sigh;
Wherefore of you, dear lady mine, I pray
By your own message—when you will, not I—
Send me what you think best as a reply
Wherewith my heart can keep itself from fear;
And, lady, search the reason of my cry—
When grief departs the coming joys are near.
Envoy.
O noble Dame, to you this note shall hie,
And when God wills I follow to my dear.
This writing speaks, and says, till I am by,
When grief departs the coming joys are near.
John Shirley, who lived about 1440, made a collection of Ballades, Roundels, Virelais, and Tragedies, in MSS., which are still extant in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. After noticing Gower, who wrote ballades in French, Charles d'Orléans, who wrote rondels in English, comes as another instance of the early use, but again as a mere exception, since the accident which led both writers to adopt exotic forms is outside the history of our native poetry, and cannot be brought forward to prove their early naturalisation. Of Charles d'Orléans much might be said worth saying, but there are so many sources of information open, that here we need note only the poems written during his captivity. He is said to have been our prisoner for about twenty-five years, and during that time to have acquired a taste for our language. The Abbé Sallier, who unearthed the manuscript of his poems in the Royal Library at Paris during the last century, says he wrote but two in English; but in the MS. at the British Museum, the Rev. H. F. Cary, the translator of Dante, found three, quoted in his Early French Poets (Bohn, 1846). The editor of that volume, the Rev. Henry Cary, son of the author, mentions in a footnote a large collection among the Harleian MSS., attributed to Charles d'Orléans, but throws doubt on their being more than translations. Into this question there is no space to enter. These are the three from Cary's book:—
Go forth, my hert, with my lady;
Loke that ye spar no bysines
To serve her with such lolyness
That ye gette her oftyme prively
That she kepe truly her promes.
Go forth, etc.