'If it befall that God thee list visite With any tourment or adversitee, Thank first the Lord, and [fond] thy-self to quite; Upon suffraunce and humilitee Found thou thy quarel, what ever that it be; Mak thy defence, and thou shalt have no losse, The remembraunce of Christ and of his crosse.' In l. 1, ed. 1561 has _the_; 2. _aduersite_; 3. _Thanke_; _lorde_; I supply _fond_, i. e. endeavour; _thy-selfe_; 4. (scans ill); 5. _Founde_; 6. _Make_. 31. _Of the Cuckowe and the Nightingale._ Printed in Bell's Chaucer, iv. 334; and in Morris's Chaucer, iv. 75. Not uncommon in MSS.; there is a copy in MS. Ff. 1. 6 in the Cambridge University Library; another in MS. Fairfax 16; another in MS. Bodley 638; another in MS. Tanner 346; and a fifth (imperfect) in MS. Arch. Selden B. 24, in the Bodleian Library. A sixth is in MS. Harl. 7333, in the British Museum. From some of these, Morris's better text was constructed; see his edition, pref. p. ix. It is worth a note, by the way, that it is _not_ the same poem as one entitled _The Nightingale_, extant in MS. no. 203 in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in MS. Cotton, Calig. A. ii., fol. 59, and attributed to Lydgate. That the first two lines are by Chaucer, we cannot doubt, for they are quoted from the Knightes Tale, ll. 927, 928. Chaucer often quotes his own lines, but it is not likely that he would take them as the subject of a new poem. On the other hand, this is just what we should expect one of his imitators to do. The present poem is a very fair imitation of Chaucer's style, and follows his peculiarities of metre far more closely than is usually the case with Lydgate. The notion, near the end, of holding a parliament of birds, with the Eagle for lord, is evidently borrowed from Chaucer's Parliament of Foules. Whilst admitting that the present poem is more worthy of Chaucer than most of the others with which it has been proposed to burden his reputation, I can see no sufficient reason for connecting him with it; and the external evidence connects it, in fact, with Hoccleve. For the copy in MS. Bodley 638 calls it 'The boke of Cupide god of loue,' at fol. 11, back; whilst Hoccleve's _Letter of Cupid_ is called 'The lettre of Cupide god of loue' in the same, fol. 38, back. The copy in the Fairfax MS. ends with the colophon--_Explicit liber Cupidinis_. The rimes are mostly Chaucerian; but the rime of _day_ with the gerund _to assay-e_ in st. 11 is suspicious; so also is that of _now_ with the gerund _to rescow-e_ in st. 46. In st. 13, _grene_ rimes with _been_, whereas _gren-e_, in Chaucer, is always dissyllabic. Chaucer's biographers have been anxious to father this poem upon him, merely because it mentions Woodstock in l. 285.