aim at poetical and lyric effects. Occasionally a passage is distinctly lyrical, as, for example, the Hymn of Adoration by the Magi in the York plays.1 In the Pearl, however, that most poetical of all Middle English poems outside of Chaucer, we have the most perfect specimen of the religious poetry of the age.2 It is a lyrical allegory, elegiac in strain, and full of religious symbolism-a sort of primitive In Memoriam and Paradiso in one. Under the form of the conventional mediæval vision, it gives expression to the tender grief of a father for the loss of his child (the Pearl), with the final consolation accorded to his faith and love through a vision of her bliss in Paradise. The intensity and the elegiac subjectivity of the feeling of the poem, accentuated by its new sense of poetic form and the recurrent stanzaic effects, as of a sonnet-sequence, raise it in many parts to a high lyric pitch.

Pearl! pleasant to princes' pay
Too cleanly closed in gold so clear,
Out of the Orient I boldly say,

Ne provëd I never her precious peer.

for princes' pleasure

Through grass to ground it from me yot;

arbour went

1 The York Plays, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (Oxford, 1885), pp. 135–6. See also the chorus of eight burgesses who worship Jesus, pp. 216-18, and the Prayer of the Priest and Anna's Welcome, p. 443:

"Welcome! blessed Mary and maiden aye,

Welcome! most meek in thine array,

Welcome! bright star that shineth bright as day,

All for our bliss!"

2 Mr Gollancz has given us a very attractive edition of the Pearl with a modern rendering (London, 1891). A synopsis of the poem may be found in Dr. Mac Donald's England's Antiphon, pp. 34 f.

I dwindle, fordokked of love-dangere,
Of that privy pearl withouten spot.

'O Pearl', quoth I, 'of rich renown,
So was it me dear that thou con deem,
In this very avisiön ;

If it be a very and sooth sermoun
That thou so goest in garlands gay,
Then well is it me in this doel-dungeon,
That thou art to that Prince's

The Middle

Lyric.

pay!'

despoiled of

love's-control

what thou

if the relation be verily true

dungeon of woe

Chaucer's few poems in lyrical measures are exotic trifles, lacking seriousness; but outside of Chaucer there is a secular lyric of conEnglish Secular siderable extent, and presenting much variety and freshness of feeling. Spring songs like "Sumer is icumen in ", songs of politics and of patriotism, love-songs, snatches of refrain like the following:

Blow, northern wind;

Send thou me my sweeting!
Blow, northern wind

Blow! blow! blow!

and short pieces in many other sorts can be found among the scanty remains of this poetry. The greater number, perhaps, are love-lyrics, songs of a somewhat conventional cast, after the Norman model, but still with an old-world sweetness and charm.

A sweetly suyre she hath to holde,
With armës, shouldre, as man wolde,
And fingers fair to folde;

neck

God wolde she were mine!

She is crystal of clannesse,

And banner of beautë;

She is lily of largesse,

She is paruenke of prouesse,

She is selsecle of sweetnesse,

And lady of lealtë.

{peria

(periwinkle of

courage heliotrope

The Normans are teaching the Englishmen the arts of gallantry and the graces of the lyric turn, and are visibly subduing the serious northern mind to the spirit of romantic love! The lyric manner, however, is not yet free. A narrow conventionalism lies behind it all-behind the religious lyric the cloistered pessimism and Manicheeism of medieval Christianity; and the artless artificiality and formalism of medieval court-life and chivalry behind the secular lyric. Thus in these love-songs there are scarcely more than two normal motives: the praise of the beloved set forth in a fixed poetrystuff of conventional similes for her beauty:

She is crystal of clannesse,
And banner of beautë;
She is lily of largesse ;

and love-plaints, turning on the hopeless aspiration of the lover for a lady whose qualities set her far above possibility of attainment, presented usually in a spring-tide setting, and full of conventional lover's hyperbole. Through all this, indeed, the poetic emotion may still be felt, but it is not strictly original. Mediæval poetry, except in the hands of great masters, like Dante and Chaucer, is highly impersonal. Lyric subjectivity is the gift of the Renaissance. The emotion of the mediæval poet takes the form of a set theme, whether of praise or plaint, as in the love-lyric, or of ascetic renuncia

tion, as in the religious lyric, or of evanescence, of mutability, the melancholy reflection of the passing of things-theme beloved alike by the poets of the Greek Anthology, by the minstrels of the Middle Ages, and by the poets of the Renaissance-which Spenser, as last of the mediævals, has sung so eloquently. Nowhere in the medieval lyric do we find the note of personal revelation and confession, the subjective and individualistic note of the sonnets of Sidney and Drummond and Shakespeare, or of the lyrics of Donne; nowhere anything like the purely personal accent of Shelley's lyric cry, that concentrated utterance of the soul's despair of the modern idealist, sounding like the wail of a lost spirit:

O world, O life, O time,

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?

No more; ah! nevermore!

The Middle English period was, doubtless, a period of artistic and poetic education for the race, and the gains are not a few, but most of them seem to be lost before the sixteenth century-lost from disuse, and fading into insignificance before the new and brilliant gains of the poetry founded on Italian art, that more fortunate offspring and development on a foreign soil of the happy first influence of the Troubadour song. The Middle English lyric is but the twittering of birds before the dawn. The full lyric chorus is not yet heard. From the death of Chaucer to the advent of Wyatt and Surrey there is practically an inter

Scotch Lyrists of the Fifteenth

Century.

regnum in the history of the English lyric as in
that of most other literary forms, marked only by
a few belated specimens of the earlier
religious and secular lyrical style, by the
ballads and other verses in imitation of
exotic French forms written by Gower, Lydgate,
Occleve, and similar contemporaries or disciples of
Chaucer, by the rare and remarkable phenomenon
of laureate Skelton's few lyrics of occasion, and,
most noteworthy of all, by the lyrical attempts of
the Scotch imitators of Chaucer-James I. of Scot-
land, Henryson, and Dunbar. In the allegories
and visions of these Scotch poets the influence of
French mediæval culture is still predominant; but
here first, nevertheless, we begin to feel that a new
light is already dawning. We feel this, for example,
in Dunbar's Lament for the Makers, in some of his
shorter lyrics, nay, even in his grotesque and terribly
mediæval Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins; we feel
it also in many passages of the King's Quair:

Worshipë, ye that lovers been, this May,
For of your bliss the kalends are begun;
And sing with us, 'Away, Winter, away!
Come, Summer, come, the sweet season and sun!'
Awake, for shame! that have your heavens won,
And amorously lift up your headës all;
Thank Love, that list you to his mercy call.

But in relation to the main growth of the English lyric, the poetry of this group of singers seems to have been an isolated phenomenon.1

1 The poetry of this Scotch School may be conveniently read in the volume of Medieval Scottish Poetry in the Abbotsford Series of the Scottish Poets, edited by Mr. George Eyre Todd (Glasgow, 1892).