LYDGATE, John, a monk of Bury St Edmunds, was the most famous English poet of the 15th century. He is a standing refutation of a popular notion that the extraordinary collapse of English poetry after Chaucer disappeared from the stage was due to the unsettled state of public affairs. The exact dates of his birth and death are not ascertained, but he began his occupation as a versemaker before Chaucer’s death, and probably ended it several years before the Wars of the Roses broke out. Public affairs were not more unsettled during his lifetime than during the lifetime of Chaucer. Like Chaucer, Lydgate enjoyed the patronage of the royal family. He was the “poet laureate” of his generation. He translated Benoît de St Maure’s History of Troy " at the commandment” of Henry V.; he wrote a poem on the battle of Agincourt; the coronation of Henry VII. furnished him with another theme; the “Good Duke Humphrey” of Gloucester “commanded” his translation of Bochas upon the Fall of Princes. The monk of Bury was in short a professional poet. According to Warton he opened a school in his monastery for teaching the sons of the nobility the arts of versification and the elegancies of composition, and it would seem from the character and the variety of the pieces attributed to him—“disguisings,” “mummings,” lives of saints, translations of standard works, devotional pieces in metre, metrical paraphrases of proverbs—that he was ready to write to order on any theme submitted to him. Lydgate attracted a good deal of attention from our early printers and antiquaries, his Fall of Princes being reprinted four times before the accession of Elizabeth. The fact that it was the largest poem in English of a tragic cast may have had something to do with the popularity ...