Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/75

] power or originality. Lydgate was a monk of Bury, and wrote upon a great variety of subjects, but his four chief poems are, "The Lyfe of our Lady," "The Fall of Princes," "The Siege of Thebes," and "The Destruction of Troy."



Lydgate is most at home in description, and most deficient in invention.



He is rather a learned man than a poet, and many of those which he calls his poems are scarcely more than translations from Latin authors. Wethamstede, the learned Abbot of St. Albans, employed him to translate into English the legend of the patron saint of his abbey, and paid him for the translating, writing, and illumination, 100 shillings. Lydgate died in his monastery at an advanced age, never having obtained any preferment through his learning or productions. In all those early ages there was a class of writers, called the ballad poets, who seem never to have had the power, or perhaps the ambition, to attach their names to their effusions, which were sung by the people, and were only collected and made known to us by Bishop Percy and Sir Walter Scott, in the "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," and in the "Border Minstrelsy."



Yet many of these are lyrics of the highest vigour and genius, such as "Chevy Chase," "Sir Andrew Barton," "The Nutbrown Maid," and the "Babes in the Wood"—the latter written