There is a royal touch in that, and it comes from a royal hand--that of Prince James of Scotland, who, taken prisoner by Henry IV., was held fast for sixteen years in the keep of Windsor Castle. Mr. Irving has made him the subject of a very pleasant paper in the Sketch-book. Though a prince, he was a poet by nature, and from the window of his prison did see the fair lady whose graces were garnered in the verse I have cited; and oddly enough, he did come to marry the subject of this very poem (who was related to the royal house of England, being grand-daughter of John of Gaunt) and thereafter did come to be King of Scotland and--what was a commoner fate--to be assassinated. That queen of his, of whom the wooing had been so romantic and left its record in the _King’s Quair_--made a tender and devoted wife--threw herself at last between him and the assassins--receiving grievous wounds thereby, but all vainly--and the poor poet-king was murdered in her presence at Perth, in the year 1437. These three poets I have named all plumed their wings to make that great flight by which Chaucer had swept into the Empyrean of Song: but not one of them was equal to it: nor, thenceforward all down through the century, did any man sing as Chaucer had sung. There were poetasters; there were rhyming chroniclers; and toward the end of the century there appeared a poet of more pretension, but with few of the graces we find in the author of the Canterbury Tales. John Skelton[60] was his name: he too a priest living in Norfolk. His rhymes, as he tells us himself, were “ragged and jagged:” but worse than this, they were often ribald and rabid--attacking with fierceness Cardinal Wolsey--attacking his fellow-priests too--so that he was compelled to leave his living: but he somehow won a place afterward in the royal household as tutor; and even the great Erasmus (who had come over from the Low Countries, and was one while teaching Greek at Cambridge) congratulates some prince of the royal family upon the great advantage they have in the services of such a “special light and ornament of British literature.” He is capricious, homely, never weak, often coarse, always quaint. From out his curious trick-track of verse, I pluck this little musical canzonet:-- “Merry Margaret As midsummer flower; Gentle as falcon Or hawk of the tower: With solace and gladness Much mirth and no madness, All good and no badness, So joyously, So maidenly, So womanly Her demeaning In everything Far, far passing That I can indite Or suffice to write Of merry Margaret As midsummer flower Gentle as falcon Or hawk of the tower: Stedfast of thought Well-made well-wrought; Far may be sought Ere you can find So courteous--so kind As merry Margaret This midsummer flower.”