LYDGATE, JOHN, an English poet, one of the immediate successors of Chaucer, assumed as his surname the name of his native place in Suffolk. The date of his birth is unknown; but it has been ascertained that he entered the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, and was ordained a subdeacon in 1389, a deacon in 1393, and a priest in 1397. He had begun to write before the death of Chaucer in 1400; and, according to Warton, seems to have reached the acme of his fame in 1430. After a short attendance at the university of Oxford, he had travelled into France and Italy, and had acquired an intimacy with the language and literature of those countries. With his taste thus improved, he opened a school for the instruction of the sons of the nobility in the arts of composition, both prose and metrical. He died at some period before 1461. To his excellence as a poet, and his proficiency in polite learning, Lydgate added a knowledge of geometry, astronomy, and theology. His genius was as many-sided as his erudition. With equal facility he delineates the London Lickpenny and the Luffe of our Lady, the religious aus-
terity of St Austin and the heroic deeds of Guy of Warwick. "If a disguising was intended," says Warton, "by the Company of Goldsmiths, a mask before his majesty at Eltham, a May-game for the sheriffs and aldermen of London, a mumming before the lord mayor, a procession of pageants from the creation for the festival of Corpus Christi, or a carol for the coronation, Lydgate was consulted and gave the poetry." This case in composition, however, was often purchased by a lameness in prosody, and a want of precision both in thought and expression. He has not the original invention and the vivid representation of his master Chaucer, whom he was so anxious to rival. Yet in many of his descriptions of scenery we find a melody of rhythm, and a sweetness of fancy, which entitle him to the name of an improver of English versification.
A complete catalogue of Lydgate's voluminous works is given in Ritson's Bibliographia Poetica. His principal poems are three. The Fall of Princes, printed by Pynson in 1494, is a paraphrase of a French translation of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum. The princes are introduced dramatically to narrate their own mishaps; and, accordingly, the poem was not inaptly styled in the first edition, The Tragedies gathered by John Bochas of all such Princes as fell from their estates since the Creation of Adam, &c. His Story of Thebes, first printed by Thynne in 1561, at the end of Chaucer's works, is an additional Canterbury tale, in which the classical story of the sons of Edipus is told with all the circumstances and machinery of romance. In a similar manner is the Trojan War treated in his Troye-Boke, printed in 1513 by command of Henry VIII. This poem is professedly a translation or paraphrase of the Historia Trojana of Guido de Colonna. The Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, edited by Halliwell, were published by the Percy Society, 1840.