That the worthy Lydgate and Hoccleve, without any of Chaucer's good luck, failed to tread in his footsteps, is thus hardly surprising. They took from him as much of his machinery as they could carry, wrote in his metres with the aid of ears sadly confused by the rapidly weakening pronunciation of final _-e_ and _-es_, and began the attempt, pursued all through the century, to make up by magniloquence what they lacked in poetry. This attempt was not confined to England. In France also there was the same invasion of long words, and it took our fair neighbour much longer to get rid of them. As the fifteenth century progressed and its successor began, it became more and more the object of the poetaster to end his lines with sounding polysyllables, and verse not written in this style was regarded as uncourtly and undignified. When we once realise that this particular experiment in language was one which had to be made, and that our fifteenth-century poets made it with all their might, we can understand how Hawes could hail Lydgate as 'the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric' (this new poetry being essentially rhetorical); how Skelton, after condescendingly praising Chaucer for the 'pleasant, easy and plain' terms in which he wrote, hastened to explain that Lydgate's efforts were 'after a higher rate'; and how the same Skelton thought it necessary in his _Phylyp Sparowe_ to make his 'young maid' excuse herself for her ignorance of 'polished terms' and 'English words elect.' Every one in these days was searching anxiously for the right word, which is indeed the most proper object of every versifier's search. Unluckily, they only looked for it among polysyllables.