John, surnamed the Monk of Bury, not, as Gibber 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 the English universities, he travelled into France and Italy; and, having thus 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 in that establishment in the year 1415. He was alive in 1446, when he must have been about sixty-six years of age; but in what year he died is not known. Lydgate, according to Pits, was an elegant poet, "a persuasive rhetorician, an expert mathematician, an acute philosopher, and a respectable 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 more harmonious, than the language and versification of Chaucer, who wrote about half a century before his time. His works are, 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 Gross, and dedicated to Henry V.; 4. Life of the Blessed Virgin, printed by Caxton; 5. The Proverbs of Lydgate upon the fall of princes, printed by Winkyn de Worde, London, 4to; 6. Dispute of the Horse, the Sheep, and the Goose, printed in Caxton's Collect. 4to; 7. The Temple of Brass, amongst the works of Chaucer; 8. London Lickpenny (vide Stow's History); besides an incredible number of other poems and translations preserved in various libraries.