LITERATURE. 429 



and reissued it in an enlarged form in 1410, the book was warmly 

 welcomed in England as well as in France by an even more influential, 

 if not larger, public. 



Lydgate began his English translation in the spring of 1430 at the 

 request of his patron, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, and completed 

 if before 1439. As a distinguished and extraordinarily prolific writer 

 of verse, it was natural for him to choose the popular rhymed decasyl- 

 labic line as his medium, and as a result of his very free rendering and 

 the addition of "moral envoys" to each chapter (at the request of 

 Humphrey) and the retention of Laurence's interpolations, the 

 work grew under his hands into a huge narrative poem of over 36,000 

 lines, in which much of the dramatic power of Boccaccio's original was 

 lost. In contrast to Boccaccio, Lydgate appears more often as a con- 

 fidential adviser of his princes than as an accuser; he wrote as a cour- 

 tier and man of the world, admonishing when he considered it necessary, 

 but never with Boccaccio's rudeness or Laurence's servility. The 

 spirit of his work throughout is that of a convinced monarchist pa- 

 tronized by royalty, a cleric fiercely intolerant of all heretical doctrines, 

 and a skillful versifier, whose slow-minded fifteenth century readers 

 valued wealth of circumstance and a conservative outlook on life much 

 more than originality of thought, imaginative power, or beauty of 

 expression. The "Fall of Princes" became one of the most popular 

 books of its time, as the existence of some thirty manuscripts, several 

 of them of great technical merit, attests, and was subsequently printed 

 four times, first by Richard Pynson in 1494, and finally by John 

 Wayland in 1558. 



It is the object of the present edition to render the work accessible 

 to students in a more correct and readable form than that of the two- 

 columned black-letter folios of the sixteenth century; and although 

 the literary interest of Lydgate's writings is but small in comparison 

 with those of his "master" Chaucer, nevertheless the "Fall of Princes" 

 is a document of considerable historical and philological importance, 

 not only because of its relation to the earlier versions of Boccaccio 

 and Laurence and to the later "Mirror for magistrates," but also, just 

 as in the case of the "Troy Book," for the reason that a large number of 

 words borrowed from the French and of uses of words both native and 

 foreign make their first appearance in the written language on its pages. 



