THREE MIDDLE ENGLISH RELIGIOUS LYRICS 



By George Coffin Taylor 



Attention has not been called, I believe, to the fact that Nos. IX and 

 X of Poems of Manuscript Cambr. DdV. 64, fol. 134-142,^ taken 

 together, comprise The Love of Jesus, from Lambeth MS. 583, pp. 

 90-102.^ Aside from differences of dialect, occasional differences of 

 phrase, and differences in the arrangement of material, the Cambr. and 

 Lamb, poems are the same. Lines 1-136 and 229-284 of Lamb, com- 

 prise poem No. X of Cambr., while lines 137-228 of Lamb, comprise 

 poem No. IX of Cambr. Which of the two versions is the source of the 

 other, one cannot say with certainty. Perhaps they are both based on a 

 similar original. The Cambr. version is ascribed to Richard Rolle, who 

 lived about 1 300-1 349. The Lamb, version is dated by Furnivall about 

 1340.3 It would seem, however, that Cambr. is either the source of 

 Lamb, or approximates more closely than Lamb, the original source, for 

 the following reasons: First, the metre of Lamb., where it differs from 

 that of Cambr., is generally uncertain, and forced as if it were the work 

 of an unskilled versifier. Cambr., on the contrary, is for the most part 

 good metre, such as we should expect from Hampole's pen. Secondly, 

 Lamb., which is written in eight-line stanzas, though uniform in this 

 respect throughout almost the entire poem, presents one irregularity of 

 versification; lines 217-220 constitute a four-line stanza. Cambr., on 

 the contrary, written in long four-line stanzas, is uniform in this respect 

 throughout. It is significant that just at the point above mentioned in 

 Lamb., where the irregularity occurs, lines 217-220, Lamb, departs most 

 widely from Cambr. Thirdly, the arrangement of material in Cambr. is 

 fairly logical, while in Lamb, it is confused. The opening stanza of 

 Cambr. IX, for example, is, to one familiar with hymns of this type in 

 Middle English, very evidently the conventional beginning of many 



' C. HoRSTMAN, Library of Early English Writers, Richard Rolle, Vol. I, pp. 75 ff. 

 » FuRNTVALL in Hymtis to the Virgin and Christ, E. E. T. S., pp. 22 ff. 

 3 Loc. cit., p. 18. 



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