JOHN, called the Monk of Bury; not, as Cibber conjectures, because he was a native of that place, for he was born about the year 1380, in the village of Lydgate: but because he was a monk of the Benedictine convent at St Edmund's-Bury. After studying some time in our English universities, he travelled to France and Italy: and, having acquired a competent knowledge of the languages of those countries, he returned to London, where he opened a school, in which he instructed the sons of the nobility in polite literature. At what time he retired to the convent of St Edmund's-Bury, does not appear; but he was certainly there in 1415. He was living in 1446, aged about 66; but in what year he died is not known. Lydgate, according to Pits, was an elegant poet, a perfusive rhetorician, an expert mathematician, an acute philosopher, and a tolerable divine. He was a voluminous writer; and, considering the age in which he lived, an excellent poet. His language is less obsolete, and his versification much more harmonious, than the language and versification of Chaucer, who wrote about half a century before him. He wrote, 1. History of the Theban war, printed at the end of Chaucer's works, 1561, 1602, 1687. 2. Poemation of good counsel; at the end of Chaucer's works. 3. The life of Hector; London 1594, folio, printed by Grofs, dedicated to Henry V. 4. Life of the blest Virgin; printed by Caxton. 5. The proverbs of Lydgate upon the fall of princes; printed by Wink. Word, London, 4to. 6. Dispute of the horse, the sheep, and the goose; printed in Caxton's Collect. 4to. 7. The temple of brafs; among the works of Chaucer. 8. London lickpenny; vide Stow's history, &c. &c. Besides an incredible number of other poems and translations preserved in various libraries, and of which the reader will find a catalogue in Bishop Tanner.