Nos. 42, 43, and 60 are admittedly genuine; and are printed below, nos. XIV., XX., and VIII. I believe nos. 44 and 57 to be so also[225]; they are discussed below, and are printed as nos. XXI. and VI. No. 61 is, of course, Lydgate's. Besides this, no. 45 is correctly ascribed to Lydgate in the MSS.; there are copies of it in MS. Fairfax 16 and in MS. Ashmole 59. No. 56 is also Lydgate's, and is so marked in MS. Harl. 2251. As to no. 46, called the Craft of Lovers, it is dated by help of two lines in the last stanza, which are thus printed by Stowe:-- 'In the yere of our lorde a .M. by rekeninge CCCXL. .&. UIII. yere folowing.' This _seems_ to give the date as 1348; whereas the language is palpably that of the fifteenth century. Whether Stowe or his printer thought fit to alter the date intentionally, I cannot say. Still, the fact is, that in the MS. marked R. 3. 19 in Trinity College Library, at fol. 156, the reading is 'CCCCXL & VIII yere,' so that the true date is rather 1448, or nearly half a century after Chaucer's death[226]. The same MS., which I suppose belonged to Stowe, contains several other of these pieces, viz. nos. 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, and perhaps others. The language and, in some cases, the ruggedness of the metre, forbid us to suppose that Chaucer can have had anything to do with them, and some are palpably of a much later date; one or more of these considerations at once exclude all the rest of Stowe's additions. It may, however, be noted that no. 47 quotes the line 'Beware alwaye, the blind eats many a fly,' which occurs as a refrain in no. 56, and it is therefore later than the time of Lydgate. The author of no. 48 says he is 'a man vnknowne.' Many lines in no. 49 are of abnormal length; it begins with--'Profulgent in preciousnes, O Sinope the queen.' The same is true of no. 51, which is addressed to a Margaret, and begins with--'In the season of Feuerere when it was full colde.' Of no. 52, Tyrwhitt says that the four first stanzas are found in different parts of an imperfect poem upon the _Fall of Man_, in MS. Harl. 2251; whilst the 11th stanza makes part of an _Envoy_, which in the same MS. is annexed to the poem entitled the _Craft of Lovers_. No. 53 is a poor affair. No. 54, called a _Balade Pleasaunte_, is very unpleasant and scurrilous, and alludes to the wedding of 'queene Iane[227]' as a circumstance that happened many years ago. No. 55 is scurrilous, odious, and stupid. I doubt if no. 58 is good enough for Lydgate. No. 59 belongs to the sixteenth century.