Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/114

98 L Y D L Y D Lydgate enjoyed the patronage of the royal family. He was the " poet laureate " of his generation. He translated Benoit de St Maure s History of Troy " at the command ment " 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 iipon 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 of this work. The Story of Thebes, based on Statius and Boccaccio, is generally supposed to have been one of his first essays. It is told as one of the Canterbury tales, the poet in his prologue feigning himself to have joined Chaucer s pilgrims at Canterbury, and recited this tale at the host s command as they rode back. Possibly more than one of two hundred and fifty-one separate poems, most of them short, ascribed to Lydgate by Ritson, have been ascribed to him on very slender authority. But the works undoubtedly his are so commonplace in thought and sentiment, and so clumsy in execution, with all allowance for transcribers errors and imperfect editing, that no injustice can have been done to his reputation by attributing any doggerel to his facile pen. He was evidently a great reader of poetry, a scholar accomplished in amount, had probably a large indiscriminate enjoyment of poetry, and probably also a boisterous enjoyment of his own facility in building up stanzas. His own mental life was probably the reverse of dull. But, like many another self-satisfied versifier, he is the cause of dulness in others. In reading him with his own contented spirit, one catches some faint reflexion of the gleeful happiness with which he seems to have poured out his abundant store of thrice- repeated phrases and images. Of artistic sensibility he was entirely destitute. He claims our sympathy by his warm admiration for Chaucer, but admiration gave him no share of Chaucer s economy of touch, rapid vivacious movement, and subtle wit. His lines are eked out by tautologous and feeble epithets, and garrulous repetitions " as clerkes can you tell," " in bookes as I rede," " the story saith certain," " the story can devise," " the story can reherse," "the story specifies,"." the story maketh mind." Something is expressed in learned terms, and then the same thing is repeated " in plain English." Lydgate is seen at his best in his illustrations of proverbs and maxims of homely morality, and by far his most successful metre is a stave of eight four-beat lines with a rhyme from the first half recurring in the second. A Satirical Balad on the Times, with the refrain " So as the crab gothe f orwarde " ; A Satirical Description of his Lady, with the refrain 41 When she hath on hire hood of green " ; A Lovers Com plaint ; Thonke God of Alle ; and Make Amendes all in this metre are among the most favourable specimens of his powers. A line of five accents seems always to have driven him into prolixity. The London Lackpenny, to the refrain of " But for lack of money I might not speed," the best known of his humorous poems, is also in four-beat lines, though there are seven lines in the stanza. Lydgate s copiousness of detail in describing customs, dresses, architecture, as well as in making literary com parisons, render his verses useful as materials for the historian; but in artistic skill he is a sad falling off from Chaucer. Personally he seems to have been a lively monk enough. In his Testament he makes confession to having been a terrible boy, " disposed to many unbridled passions. 5 He fought with his schoolfellows, and scoffed and made mouths at them " like a wanton ape" ; he played truant, and " forged leesings " in excuse ; neither hedge nor wall could keep him out of orchards ; he " told cherry-stones " when he ought to have been at church, and threw his paternoster and his creed at the cock. Highly decorous respectable old men often take a pleasure in looking back, as Justice Shallow did, to the follies of their youth, and perhaps exaggerating them, but there is nothing in Lydgate s confession inconsistent with his poetry. A dull writer is generally a person of high animal spirits ; only that could sustain him through platitudes which other people find so dreary. (w. M.) LYDIA. It is difficult to fix the boundaries of Lydia Plate I very exactly, partly because they varied at different times, partly because we are still but imperfectly acquainted with the geography of western Asia Minor. The name is first found, under the form of Luddi, in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal, who received tribute from Gyges about 660 B.C. In Homer we read only of Meeonians (21., ii. 865, v. 43,x. 431), and the place of the Lydian capital Sardes is taken by Hyde (//., xx. 385), unless this wastlie name of the district in which Sardes stood (see Strabo, xiii. p. 626). 1 The earliest Greek writer who mentions the name is Mimnermus of Colophon, in the 37th Olympiad. According to Herodotus (i. 7), the Meiones (called Mseones by other writers) were named Lydians after Lydus, the son of Attys, in the mythical epoch which preceded the rise of the Heraclid dynasty. In historical times, however, the Mseones were a tribe inhabiting the district of the Upper Hermus, where a town called Mseonia (now Mennen) existed (Pliny, N. H., v. 30 ; Hierocles, p. 670). The Lydians must originally have been an allied tribe which bordered upon them to the north-west, and occupied the plain of Sardes or Magnesia at the foot of Trnolus and Sipylus. They were cut off from the sea by the Greeks, who were in possession, not only of the Bay of Smyrna, but also of the country north of Sipylus as far as Temnus, in the Boghaz, or pass, through which the Hermus forces its way from the plain of Magnesia into its lower valley. 2 In an Homeric epigram the ridge north of the Hermus, on which the ruins of Temnus lie, is called Sardene. Northward the Lydians extended at least as far as the Gyga^an Lake (Lake Coloe, now Mermereh), and the Sardene range (now Dumanly DagJi). The plateau of the Bin Bir Tepe , on the southern shore of the Gygasan Lake, was the chief burial- place of the inhabitants of Sardes, and is still thickly studded with tumuli, among which the " tomb of Alyattes " towers to a height of 260 feet. Next to Sardes, Magnesia ad Sipylum was the chief city of the country, having taken the place of the ancient Sipylus, now probably repre sented by an almost inaccessible acropolis discovered by Mr Humann not far from Magnesia on the northern cliff of Mount Sipylus. In its neighbourhood is the famous seated figure of " Niobe " (II, xxiv. 614-17), cut out of the rock, and probably intended to represent the goddess Cybele, to which the Greeks attached their legend of Niobe. According to Pliny (v, 31), Tantalis, afterwards swallowed up by earthquake in the pool Sale or Saloe, was the ancient name of Sipylus and " the capital of Maeonia" (Paus., vii. 24; Strabo, xii. p. 579). 1 Pliny (v. 30) makes it the Mceonian name.

2 See W. M. Ramsay in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, ii. 2.