at the gate of heaven,--a world of childhood, and innocence, and love,-the Golden Age. And there imagination loves to picture the poet, grave but genial, with his eyes cast down, dreamy but observant,—a manly, scholarly, courtly, gracious gentleman. It was thus that he appeared to Akenside when he wrote his Inscription for a statue of Chaucer at Woodstock.

"Such was old Chaucer; such the placid mien
Of him who first with harmony inform'd
The language of our fathers. Here he dwelt
For many a cheerful day. These ancient walls
Have often heard him, while his legends blythe
He sung: of love, or knighthood, or the wiles
Of homely life; through each estate and age,
The fashions and the follies of the world
With cunning hand portraying. Though perchance
From Blenheim's towers, O stranger, thou art come
Glowing with Churchill's trophies; yet in vain
Dost thou applaud them, if thy heart be cold
To him, this other hero; who, in times
Dark and untaught, began with charming verse
To tame the rudeness of his native land."

Having traced the progress of English Verse from its religious and historic origins to Chaucer, we have now to indicate the main channels through which it flowed from Chaucer to Burns. This task need not occupy us long, partly because it has been so often and so ably performed by others that no portion of the literary history of England is better known, and partly because it performs itself in this volume. If it be read with the intelligence which such an anthology demands, and which does not necessarily imply scholarship, al

though it does imply the critical spirit, it will be its own historian. No one can read it without perceiving that English Verse was distinguished by such and such qualities at such and such periods that certain classes of subjects were present in it, or were absent from it; that its rhythms were not permanent but changeable, discordant combinations of sound slipping into musical cadences, or the reverse; that it was now pedantic and labored, and now careless and unscholarly; now abstract, and now personal; now frigid, and now passionate; now lyrical, and now dramatic; now romantic, and now classical ;-there is no occasion to read between the lines to read all this, for it is as clear in the letter as in the spirit.

The period between Chaucer and Wyatt and Surrey was barren of poets but prolific of versifiers. Ritson enumerates between sixty and seventy of the last in the fifteenth century alone. They were of all ranks and professions, the clerical predominating, ranging from monks and priests up through college chaplains and canons to bishops. The laity were represented by an ironmonger, a proctor, an alderman, a courtier, a groom of the royal chamber, a duke, and a king. The staple of their verse was religion, with a little history intermixed, comments upon the Penitential Psalms, ballads on the Virgin, addresses to Christ, Lives of the Saints, moral treatises, and chronicles of England and France. Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, a man of birth and fortune, wrote three long poems, one in French verse, entitled Speculum Meditantis, another in Latin elegiac verse, entitled Vox Clamantis, and another in English octosyllabic verse entitled Confessio Amantis.

Campbell says that his English poetry contains a digest of all that constituted the knowledge of his age; that his contemporaries greatly esteemed him; and that the Scottish and English writers of the subsequent period speak of him with unqualified admiration. Gower was prolix where Chaucer was garrulous, and where Chaucer merely nodded he was overcome with slumber. No one cares to awaken the moral Gower: he sleeps the sleep of the just. Lydgate, another contemporary of Chaucer, a monk in the Benedictine monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, was an indefatigable versifier. The names of two hundred and fifty-one of his productions will be found in Ritson. He is best known by The Storie of Thebes, founded on the Thebaid of Statius and the Teseide of Boccaccio, The Hystory, Sege, and Dystruccion of Troy, founded on the Latin prose history of Troy by Guido di Colonna, and The Falls of Princes, founded on a French version of a Latin treatise by Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. As Boccaccio claimed (or Lydgate's printer for him) that his lamentable history went back to the creation of Adam and came down to his own time, the poem into which it burgeoned was naturally a vast one. Occleve, a third contemporary of Chaucer, whom he appears to have known personally, wrote largely upon a variety of topics, his chief work being a poem entitled De Regimine Principum. It is a free version of a Latin treatise with that title, and is written in Chaucer's stanza. A specimen of it may not be uninteresting as illustrating the poetic manner of the period, and as showing the estimation in which Chaucer was then held.

"O maister dere and fader reverent,

My maister Chaucer! floure of eloquence,
Mirrour of fructuous entendement,

O universal fadir in science,

Allas! that thou thyne excellent prudence
In thy bedde mortel myghtest not bequeathè:
What eyled Dethe? allas! why wold he sle the ?

O Dethe, that didest not harmè singulere

In slaughtre of hym, but all this lond it smerteth :
But natheles yit hast thow no powere

His name to slee; hys hye vertu asterteth
Unslayne fro the, whiche ay us lyfly herteth
With bookès of his ornat enditying,

This is to alle this lond enlumynyng."

The stream of English Verse was swollen in the fifteenth century by several rivers of Scottish origin. Barbour, a churchman, who studied at the University of Oxford, and rose to the dignity of Archdeacon of Aberdeen, wrote The Broite, a metrical history of Scottish kings, from Brutus and his son Albanac down, The Bruce, a metrical history of that famous king and hero, and many Lives of Saints. Henry the Minstrel, commonly called Blind Harry, celebrated another Scottish hero in The Wallace-a long poem in heroic couplets. Wyntoun, prior of the monastery of St. Serf's Inch, wrote in octosyllabic rhyme an Original Cronykil of Scotland, which began with the creation of the world, and came down to the first decade of the fifteenth century. James the First, prisoner of state in England for nearly twenty years, wrote, in rhyme royal, The King's Quair, the subject of which was his love for the Lady Joanna Beaufort, whom he first saw walking in the garden below the window of his prison

in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, and whom he married soon afterward. Henryson, a student of the University of Glasgow, and, in later life, a schoolmaster in Dumfermline, wrote The Testament of Cresseid, a continuation of Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, a translation of Æsop's Fables, and Robin and Makyne, the earliest known English pastoral. Dunbar, a student of the University of St. Andrews, a Franciscan novitiate, and, later, Court poet, wrote The Lament for the Makars, The Thistle and the Rose, The Golden Targe, The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, The Two Married Women and the Widow, The Devil's Inquest, A Winter's Walk, and The Merle and the Nightingale. Douglas, scholar and prelate, wrote The Palice of Honour, Kind Hart, and made a translation of the Eneid, which Craik says was the first English version of any ancient classic that had yet appeared in either kingdom. Campbell considers this group of Scottish versifiers superior on the whole, in originality and spirit, to their English contemporaries, though their style was, for the most part, cast in a worse taste. "The prevailing fault of English diction, in the fifteenth century," he says, "is redundant ornament, and an affectation of anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of 'aureate terms,' the Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south. Some exceptions to this remark, I am aware, may be found in Dunbar, who sometimes exhibits simplicity and lyrical terseness; but even his style has frequent deformities of quaintness, false ornament, and alliteration. The best of them, when they meant to be most eloquent, tore up roots from the Latin, which never took root in the lan