ON AUTHORS AND BOOKS, NO. IX.
Eustache Deschamps. Except in the two centuries next after the conquest, contemporaneous French notices of early English writers seem to be of rather infrequent occurrence.
On this account, and on other accounts, the ballad addressed to Geoffrey Chaucer by Eustache Deschamps deserves repetition. Its text requires to be established, in order that we may be aware of its real obscurities—for no future memoir of Chaucer can be considered as complete, without some reference to it.
The best authorities on Eustache Deschamps are MM. Crapelet, Raynouard, and Paulin Paris. To M. Crapelet we are indebted for the publication of Poésies morales et historiques d'Eustache Deschamps; to M. Raynouard, for an able review of the volume in the Journal des Savants; and to M. Paulin Paris, for an account of the manuscript in which the numerous productions of the author are preserved. Of the author himself, the learned M. Paris thus writes:—
"On pourroit surnommer Eustache Deschamps le Rutebeuf du XIVe siècle.—Ses oeuvres comprennent des épitres, des discours en prose, des jeux dramatiques, des ouvrages latins, des apologues, un grand poème moral, et un infinité de ballades et rondeaux pieux, bouffons, satiriques," &c.
Two impressions of the ballad in question are before me; one, in the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer by sir Harris Nicholas, dated 1843—and the other in a volume entitled Geoffrey Chaucer, poète anglais du XIVe siècle. Analyses et Fragments par H. Gomont, Paris, 1847.—I transcribe the ballad from the latter volume, as less accessible to English students:—
"BALLADE INÉDITE ADRESSÉE A GEOFFREY
CHAUCER PAR EUSTACHE DESCHAMPS.
O Socrates, plains de philosophie,
Senèque en meurs et Anglais en pratique,