"And when Priam in full thrifty wyse
Performed hath as ye have heard devyse,
Ordained eke, as Guido[1] can you tell,
A certain nombre of priestes for to dwell
In the temple in their devotions,
Continually with devout orisons
For the soule of Hector for to pray.
*****To which priestes the kyng gave mansyons,
There to abide, and possessyons,
The which he hath to them mortysed
Perpetually, as ye have heard devysed,
And while they kneel, pray, and wake,
I caste fully me an end to make
Finally of this my thirde booke
On my rude manner as I undertooke."
The way in which the Homeric characters are modernised in Chaucer and Dryden, and even in Shakspeare's 'Troilus and Cressida,' is a deviation from their originals hardly more excusable, though less absurd, than this of Lydgate's. They copied, in fact, not from the original at all, but from the medieval corruptions of it. Racine's tragedies are in a higher vein, and his Iphigenia, though not Homer's story, does more justice to some of Homer's characters: but after all, as has been well observed, "they are dressed in the Parisian fashions, with speech and action accordingly."[2]
The Iliad, as has been already remarked, closes more abruptly than its modern title would seem to justify, for the Tale of Troy is left half untold. Imitators of the great bard followed him, and though their works are lost to us, the legends upon which they worked have been reproduced by later writers. The poems once known as the 'Little Iliad' and the 'Sacking of Troy' have left little more than their names, and some few frag-
