But this mad Amelek Like to a Mamelek, He regardeth lords Not more than potshords; He is in such elation Of his exaltation, And the supportation Of our sovereign lord, That, God to record, He ruleth all at will. Without reason or skill; Howbeit the primordial Of his wretched original, And his base progeny, And his greasy genealogy, He came of the sank[73] royal That was cast out of a butcher’s stall. _Why come ye not to Court?_ =3. John Lydgate (1370–1451)= had a great reputation in his day, but little of it has survived. He was born at Lydgate, near Newmarket, and became a monk at Bury St. Edmunds, where he rose to be priest in 1397. He studied and wrote much, gaining a wide reputation both as a scholar and a poet. The dates of his birth and death are only approximately fixed. Lydgate was a friend of Chaucer, upon whom he models much of his poetry. But as a poet he is no Chaucer. He has none of the latter’s metrical skill and lively imagination, and the enormous mass of his poems only enhances their futility. _The Falls of Princes_, full of platitudes and wordy digressions, is no less than 7,000 verses long; _The Temple of Glass_, of the common allegorical type, is mercifully shorter; and so is _The Story of Thebes_, a feeble continuation of Chaucer’s _Knight’s Tale_. On rare occasions, as in _London Lickpenny_, he is livelier; but he has no ear for meter, and the common vices of his time--prolixity, lack of humor, and pedantic allegory--lie heavy upon him. =4. Thomas Occleve=, or =Hoccleve (1368–1450)=, may have been born in Bedfordshire; but we know next to nothing about him, and that he tells us himself. He was a clerk in the Privy Seal Office, from which in 1424 he retired on a pension to Hampshire. His principal works are _The Regement of Princes_, written for the edification of Henry VIII, and consisting of a string of tedious sermons; _La Male Règle_, partly autobiographical, in a sniveling fashion; _The Complaint of Our Lady_; and _Occleve’s Complaint_. The style of Occleve’s poetry shows the rapid degeneration that set in immediately after the death of Chaucer. His meter, usually rhyme royal or couplets, is loose and sprawling, the style is uninspired, and the interest of the reader soon ebbs very low. He himself, in his characteristic whining way, admits it with much truth: Fader Chaucer fayne wold han me taught, But I was dul, and learned lite or nought. =5. Stephen Hawes (1474–1530)= was a Court poet during the first twenty years of the sixteenth century. Very little is known of him, even the dates of his birth and death being largely matters of surmise.