It is a common enough literary experience for a sentence or few words to jump out of a page and hit the reader between the eyes, They just leave their context in the smudge of grey the type becomes, and stand out as if they were set in a special, bold advertising fount—the type that you can "read while you run". That is what happened with "London Lickpenny" last week. It leapt out of a page of proverbs, Proverbs, of all things! Its inclusion in a page of proverbs seems inexplicable. It was invented by one John Lydgate, who lived and died (in the parlance of records) circa 1970- circa 1450, and combined with the profession ofthe priesthood a great enthusiasm for literature. He had once met Chaucer and had greatly admired—that wonderful man, He had also read most of Chaucer's works and when he took to writing himself was not ashamed to borrow cone or two of his ideas. "London Lickpenny" was his own, however, and he wrote a poem about it in which he remarks somewhat bitterly "for lack of money I could not speed. Since a biographer of poets of his type usually writes centuries afte: every one else has forgotten about them and thus has to dig about in all sorts of old documents and chance remains for any particulars worthy of inclusion in their biographies, it is hat surprising that this Phrase has not been noted, It is commonly believed by one set of admirers that John Lydgate attained to the priorate of Hat-field Broadoak, after spending years in improving his education, while there is another school which insists that he even went to Paris and Rome to'refresh his mind from the founts of wisdom which flowed there. But surely one who wrote with such conviction about "London Lickpenny" and bemoaned the fact that "for lack of money he could not speed" could not have enjoyed the comfortable position of prior, or have been able to afford the expense—and it wai then terrific—of touring the Continent in search of such a thing as knowledge, John Lydgate, if thi¢ poem reflects anything of his own experience: must have known what it was to be "hard up".
This is not mentioned, however, with the purpose of setting on foot an historical controversy. So many years after his demis can matter very little whether was rolling in the wealth of a fat priory, or had a hard struggle asa schoolmaster in his declining di i clined to think, Especially is this the case since he did not contribute anything of really permanent value to English literature. He survives as a relic of the age in which, it may be said, English literature w: born, The "well of English' Chaucer, had set a style which John Lydgate, and with him several other contemporaries, followed without appreciation of the subtler beauties of their model. To them, as for some time later, Chaucer was simply teller of interesting stories, and they tried to do the same thing with varying success. But they did not possess the qualities which made Chaucer live, and they even erred in style in the view of contemporary critics, as the epitaph of John Lydgate Eke John Lydgate, sometime monk of Bury, His books indited with terms of And half changed Latin, with conceits of poetry.
In view of this it is interesting and even curious that a modera biographer—not apologis should comment—upon his lucidity. "Since his writings are read more easily than Chaucer's, the inference is plain—that he was more effectual as a maker our present English," says this writer.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.