Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in
his _Governail of Princes_, a didactic poem translated from the Latin
about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS. a
colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent."

This londës verray tresour and richesse
Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable
Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse
Dispoilëd hath this londe of the swetnésse
Of Rhetoryk.

Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a
Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very
prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the _Story of Thebes_,
as an addition to the _Canterbury Tales_. His ballad of _London
Lyckpenny_, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the
law courts at Westminster in search of justice--

But for lack of mony I could not spede--

is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.

Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was
carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of
eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of state. There he wrote
during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, entitled
the _King's Quhair_ (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza,
which had been employed by Lydgate in his _Falls of Princes_ (from
Boccaccio), and which was afterward called the "rime royal," from its
use by King James. The _King's Quhair_ tells how the poet, on a May