But twenty wintir passed continuelly Excesse at borde hath leyd his knyf with me. The great number of public-houses excite people to drink, So often that man can nat wel seyn nay. He would have drunk harder if there had been more money in his pouch: had Occleve been a richer man there would be less of the rhymes of Occleve. He liked the society of gay girls, which is expensive, To suffre hem paie had been no courtesie. He abstained from discourteous language, I was so ferd with any man to fighte. The tapsters said that Occleve was "a real gentleman," "a verray gentil man". He was too lazy to walk to his office; this indolent civil servant, he took a boat, and the oarsmen knew and flattered him. He is rather impudent and impenitent, but he seems to ask for no more than was his due in the way of money. The picture is drawn from the life, whether dramatically studied, or only too truly told of Occleve. Being what he calls himself, Occleve wrote over 5000 lines of good moral advice to "the mad Prince," the friend of Poins and Falstaff (1411-1412). He acts as his own "awful example". He asks for money, and his poem is a compilation from various musty sources; but he is always laxly autobiographical, a loose, genial, familiar knave. Conceivably he may have met the Prince in a tavern; it is a pity that Shakespeare did not think of bringing this shuffler, in Falstaff's company, to take purses at Gadshill. He bids the Prince to burn heretics, and, in the interests of peace with France, to marry Katharine, daughter of the mad Charles VI. Henry took both pieces of advice, but the marriage brought not peace, but the sword in a Maiden's hand. Like Villon, Occleve wrote a poem (more than one), to the Blessed Virgin: he is always very orthodox. He had an interval of darkened mind, but recovered and went on versifying, a pathetic figure, for he was a married man, and his wife must have endured things intolerable. Occleve was very human: as a poet his versification is as loose as that of Lydgate. He died about 1450. Hawes. Stephen Hawes was the last of the English followers of Chaucer who deserves notice. Between him and the genuine Middle Ages a great gulf exists. The art of printing is familiar to Hawes. Writing of Chaucer he says of the poet's many books He dyd compyle, whose goodly name _In printed bokes doth remayne in fame_, where the jostling vowels of "name," "remayne" and "fame" prove Hawes to be a careless author. In his own time, he says, writers "spend their time in vainful vanity, making balades of fervent amity, as gestes and trifles without fruitfulness". Hawes alone "of my Master Lydgate will follow the trace".