morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle
garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with

The sharpë, greenë, sweetë juniper.

He was listening to "the little sweetë nightingale," when suddenly
casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once
his "heart became her thrall." The incident is precisely like Palamon's
first sight of Emily in Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and almost in the
very words of Palamon the poet addresses his lady:

Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly crëatúre
Or heavenly thing in likeness of natúre?
Or are ye very Nature, the goddéss,
That have depainted with your heavenly hand
This garden full of flowrës as they stand?

Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal
prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of _Venus_, _Minerva_,
and _Fortune_, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging to
Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings to
his window a spray of red gilly flowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in
golden letters, with a message of encouragement.

James I. may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer,
Gower, and Lydgate as his masters. His education was English, and so was
the dialect of his poem, although the unique MS. of it is in the Scotch
spelling. The _King's Quhair_ is somewhat overladen with ornament and
with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon the whole, a
rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the