“‘I am a child uncouth,
And come out of the south,
And would be made a knight,
Lord, I pray thee nouthe,
With thy merry mouthe,
Grant me anon right.’
“Then said Arthoúr the king,
‘Anon, without dwelling,
Tell me thy name aplight!
For sethen I was ybore,
Ne found I me before
None so fair of sight.’
“That child said, ‘By Saint Jame,
I not what is my name;
I am the moré nis;
But while I was at hame
My mother, in her game,
Clepéd me Beaufis.’
“Then said Arthoúr the king,
‘This is a wonder thing
By God and Saint Denis!
When he that would be knight
Ne wot not what he hight,
And is so fair of vis.
“‘Now will I give him a name
Before you all in same,
For he is so fair and free,
By God and by Saint Jame,
So clepéd him ne’er his dame,
What woman so it be.
“‘Now clepéth him all of us,
Li Beaus Disconus,
For the love of me!
Then may ye wite a rowe,
‘The Faire Unknowe,’
Certes, so hatté he.”
John Gower’s “Confessio Amantis” was a story book, like the Canterbury Tales, with a contrivance of its own for stringing the tales together, and Gower was at work on it nearly about the time when his friend Chaucer was busy with his Pilgrims. The story here extracted was an old favourite. It appeared in Greek about the year 800, in the romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. It was told by Vincent of Beauvais in the year 1290 in his “Speculum Historiale;” and it was used by Boccaccio for the first tale of the tenth day of his “Decameron.”
Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate were the old poetical triumvirate, though Lydgate, who was about thirty years old when Chaucer died, has slipped much out of mind. His verses on the adventures of the Kentish rustic who came to London to get justice in the law courts, and his words set to the action of an old piece of rustic mumming, “Bicorn and Chichevache,” here represent his vein of playfulness. He was a monk who taught literature at Bury St. Edmunds, and was justly looked upon as the chief poet of the generation who lived after Chaucer’s death.
Next follows in this volume a scrap of wise counsel to take life cheerfully, from the Scottish poet, William Dunbar. He lived at the Scottish Court of James the Fourth when Henry the Seventh reigned in England, and who was our greatest poet of the north country before Burns.
Next we come to the poets “who so did please Eliza and our James,” and represent their playfulness by Drayton’s “Dowsabell,” and that most exquisite of fairy pieces, his “Nymphidia,” where Oberon figures as the mad Orlando writ small, and Drayton earned his claim to be the Fairies’ Laureate, though Herrick, in the same vein, followed close upon him. Michael Drayton, nearly of an age with Shakespeare, was, like Shakespeare, a Warwickshire man. Empty tradition says that Shakespeare died of a too festive supper shared with his friend Drayton, who came to visit him.