For a storye which is not plainly told, But constreyned under _wordes few_ For lack of truth, wher they ben new or olde, Men by reporte cannot the matter shewe; These oakés greaté be not down yhewe First at a stroke, but by a _long prócesse_; Nor long stories a word may not expresse. LYDGATE, in his "Fall of Princes." On this Gray has delivered the following observations:--"These 'long processes,' indeed, suited wonderfully with the attention and simple curiosity of the age in which LYDGATE lived; many a _stroke_ have he and the best of his contemporaries spent upon _a sturdy old story_, till they had blunted their own edge and that of their readers--at least a modern reader will find it so: but it is a folly to judge of the understanding and patience of those times by our own. They loved, I will not say tediousness, but _length_ and a train of circumstances in a narration. The vulgar do so still: it gives an air of reality to facts; it fixes the attention; raises and keeps in suspense their expectation, and supplies the defects of their little and lifeless imagination; and it keeps pace with the slow motion of their own thoughts. Tell them a story as you would tell it to a man of wit; it will appear to them as an object seen in the night by a flash of lightning: but when you have placed it in various lights and in various positions, they will come at last to see and feel it as well as others. But we need not confine ourselves to the vulgar, and to understandings beneath our own. Circumstance ever was and ever will be the life and the essence both of oratory and of poetry. It has in some sort the same effect upon every mind that it has upon that of the populace; and I fear the _quickness and delicate impatience of these polished times_ in which we live are but the forerunners of the decline of all those beautiful arts which depend upon the imagination. Homer, the father of _circumstance_, has occasion for the same apology which I am making for Lydgate and for his predecessors."[8]