XXIX. BALADE. This poor stanza, with its long-drawn lines, appears in Stowe at the end of 'Chaucer's Works.' In the Trinity MS., it occurs at the end of a copy of The Parlement of Foules. § 77. An examination of the pieces contained in the present volume leads us to a somewhat remarkable result, viz. that we readily distinguish in them the handiwork of _at least_ twelve different authors, of whom no two are much alike, whilst every one of them can be distinguished from Chaucer. These are: (1) the author of The Testament of Love, who writes in a prose style all his own; (2) the author of The Plowmans Tale and Plowmans Crede, with his strong powers of invective and love of alliteration, whose style could never have been mistaken for Chaucer's in any age[45]; (3) the author of Jack Upland, with his direct and searching questions; (4) John Gower, with his scrupulous regularity of grammatical usages; (5) Thomas Hoccleve, who too often accents a dissyllable on the latter syllable when it should be accented on the former; (6) Henry Scogan, whose lines are lacking in interest and originality; (7) John Lydgate[46], who allows his verse too many licences, so that it cannot always be scanned at the first trial; (8) Sir Richard Ros, who writes in English of a quite modern cast, using _their_ and _them_ as in modern English, and wholly discarding the use of final _-e_ as an inflexion; (9) Robert Henryson, who writes smoothly enough and with a fine vein of invention, but employs the Northern dialect; (10) Sir Thomas Clanvowe, who employs the final _-e_ much more frequently than Chaucer or even Gower; (11) the authoress of The Flower and the Leaf and The Assembly of Ladies, to whom the final _-e_ was an archaism, very convenient for metrical embellishment; and (12) the author of The Court of Love, who, while discarding the use of the final _-e_, was glad to use the final _-en_ to save a hiatus or to gain a syllable, and did not hesitate to employ it where it was grammatically wrong to do so. § 78. If the reader were to suppose that this exhausts the list, he would be mistaken; for it is quite easy to add at least one known name, and to suggest three others. For the piece numbered XXVI, on p. 449, has been identified as the work of John Walton, who wrote a verse translation of Boethius in the year 1410; whilst it is extremely unlikely that no. XXVII, written in Lowland Scottish, was due to Henryson, the only writer in that dialect who has been mentioned above. This gives a total of _fourteen_ authors already; and I believe that we require yet two more before the Virelai and the Sayings printed by Caxton (nos. XXV and XXVIII) can be satisfactorily accounted for. As for no. XIX--the Envoy to Alison--it _may_ be Lydgate's, but, on the other hand, it may not. And as for no. XXIX, it is of no consequence.