1400-1599. The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet came whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them. The _manner_ of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, remains his own secret. Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as the _Court of Love_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the _Cuckow and the Nightingale_, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers. If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the first two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces, such as the _Boke of the Duchesse_ and the _Parlament of Foules_. Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his _Governail of Princes_, a didactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS. a colored portrait of his "maister dere and fader reverent." This londes verray tresour and richesse Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse Of Rhetoryk. Another versifier of this same generation was John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the _Story of Thebes_, as an addition to the _Canterbury Tales_. His ballad of _London Lyckpenny_, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the law courts at Westminster in search of justice-- But for lack of mony I could not spede-- is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life. Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was carried by James I., who had been captured by the English when a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of state. There he wrote during the reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six cantos, entitled the _King's Quhair_ (King's Book), in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, which had been employed by Lydgate in his _Falls of Princes_ (from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called the "rime royal," from its use by King James. The _King's Quhair_ tells how the poet, on a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper. He was listening to "the little sweete nightingale," when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once his "heart became her thrall." The incident is precisely like Palamon's first sight of Emily in Chaucer's _Knight's Tale_, and almost in the very words of Palamon the poet addresses his lady: