SOME REMARKS ON THE POEMS OF JOHN LYDGATE

John Lydgate was born at a place of that name in Suffolk, about the year 1370.

I followed after, fordulled for rudenèss,
More than three scorè yerès set my date.
Lustè of youth, passed his freshĕnesse,
Colours of rhetorike, to help me translate,
Were faded away; I was born in Lydgate
Where Bacchus' licour doth ful scarsely flete,
My dry soul for to dewè and to wete.
    Prologue to Book viii. by Bochas on the Fall of Princes.

This work, he tells us, was begun while Henry the Sixth was in France, where that King never was but when he went to be crowned at Paris in 1432, so that if Lydgate were then upwards of threescore, he must have been born at the time I have assigned; and Tanner says that he was ordained a deacon in 1393, which is usually done in the twenty-third year of a man's age. He was a monk of the Benedictine order at St. Edmund's Bury, and in 1423 was elected prior of Hatfield-Brodhook, but the following year had license to return to his convent again. His condition, one would imagine, should have supplied him with the necessaries of life, yet he more than once complains to his great patron the protector,

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