Page:The Chronicle of Clemendy.pdf/108

 patience, and really good poets of severe morality like Maistre Jehan can gain no hearing. Formerly no maiden of gentle blood would have dared to skip a line of Le Roman de la Mouche, and many right virtuous and illustrious ladies have confessed that they owe all their good qualities to it and their tapestry work; but all this is changed. Hard by the postern gate was lodged Master Geoffrey Tudor, and here he wrote the fifth Book of Sir Percival of Trematon, a romance stuffed fuller of enchantments, battles, dragons, giants, magicians, peerless ladies, mirrors of chivalry and coat-armour than any other work of the species; and it is stated that the exquisite delineation of the Castle of Joyous Garde in the fifth book is the exact portraiture of Caldicot as it was in the reign of the last De Bohun. Atop of the south-eastern tower was the apartment of Master Ignoramus de Prato, one of those gentry who interfere with the privacy of the Lunatics, Mercurials, Jovials, and (worst of all) Venerians, who know rather more about the future than about the present, and who will tell you whether you will dance from a ladder or say your prayers kneeling—at the block: and what's more they'll show you the reasons of it, and how it must be so from a malign aspect of Saturn, and in such wise and in so many hard words that for very decency's sake you'll not presume to die in your bed. Master Ignoramus his little tract (500 pp. folio) on Decumbitures was first printed at Venice in the year of grace 1495, and with it is his Dedication to "The Most Noble Prince, Hum-