Lydgate is very fond of what may be called _catalogues_; he begins by enumerating every kind of possibility. You may be rich, or strong, or prudent, &c.; or fair (22) or ugly (24); you may have a wife (29), or you may not (36); you may be fat (43), or you may be lean (46); or staid (57), or holy (64); your dress may be presentable (71), or poor (72), or middling (73); you may speak much (78) or little (80); and so on; for it is hard to come to an end. At l. 106, he begins all over again with womankind; and the conclusion is, that you should govern your tongue, and never listen to slander. Thynne's text is not very good; the MSS. are somewhat better. He makes the odd mistake of printing _Holynesse beautie_ for _Eleynes beaute_ (115); but Helen had not much to do with holiness. Two of the stanzas (71-7 and 106-112) are now printed for the first time, as they occur in the MSS. only. Indeed, MS. H. (Harl. 2251) is the sole authority for the former of these two stanzas. § 41. XIII. BEWARE OF DOUBLENESS. This is a favourable example of Lydgate's better style; and is written with unusual smoothness, owing to the shortness of the lines. It was first printed in 1561. There is a better copy in the Fairfax MS., which has been taken as the basis of the text. The copy in MS. Ashmole 59 is very poor. The title--'Balade made by Lydgate'--occurs in MS. Addit. 16165. Stowe, being unacquainted with the phrase _ambes as_ (l. 78), though it occurs in Chaucer, turned _ambes_ into _lombes_, after which he wrongly inserted a comma; and _lombes_ appears, accordingly, in all former editions, with a comma after it. What sense readers have hitherto made of this line, I am at a loss to conjecture. § 42. XIV. A BALADE: WARNING MEN, ETC. First printed by Stowe in 1561, from the MS. in Trinity College Library, marked R. 3. 19, which I have used in preference to the printed edition. There is another, and more complete copy in the same library, marked O. 9. 38, which has contributed some excellent corrections. Moreover, it gives a better arrangement of stanzas three and four, which the old editions transpose. More than this, it contains a unique stanza (36-42), which has not been printed before. The poem also occurs in Shirley's MS. Harl. 2251, which contains a large number of poems by Lydgate; and is there followed by another poem of seven stanzas, attributed to Lydgate. That the present poem is Lydgate's, cannot well be doubted; it belongs to the same class of his poems as no. XII above. I find it attributed to him in the reprint of 'Chaucer's Poems' by Chalmers, in 1810. The substitution of the contracted and idiomatic form _et_ for the later form _eteth_ is a great improvement. It is due to MS. O. 9. 38, where the scribe first wrote _ette_, but was afterwards so weak as to 'correct' it to _etyth_. But this 'correction' just ruins the refrain. _Et_ was no doubt becoming archaic towards the middle of the fifteenth century.