The history of the Work divides itself under three several heads; viz. 1. Of its origin. 2. Of the 'primary inventor.’[1] 3. Of the various editions. But before these are separately examined, there may be fitly introduced the following view taken by our admirable historian of English Poetry, of the turbulent period of its first appearance. “True genius,” Warton says, “unseduced by the cabals, and unalarmed by the dangers of faction, defies or neglects those events, which destroy the peace of mankind, and often exerts its operations amidst the most violent commotions of a state. Without patronage and without readers, I may add without models, the earlier Italian writers, while their country was shook by the intestine tumults of the Guelfes and Guibelines, continued to produce original compositions both in prose and verse, which yet stand unrivalled. The age of Pericles and of the Peloponnesian war was the same. Careless of those who governed or disturbed the world, and superior to the calamities of a quarrel, in which two mighty leaders contended for the prize of universal dominion, Lucretius wrote his sublime didactic poem On the System of Nature, Virgil his Bucolics, and Cicero his Books of Philosophy. The proscriptions of Augustus did not prevent the progress of the Roman literature. In the turbulent and unpropitious reign of Queen Mary, when controversy was no longer confined to speculation, and a spiritual warfare polluted every part of England with murthers more atrocious than the slaughter of the most bloody civil contest, a poem was planned, although not fully completed, which illuminates with no common lustre that interval of darkness, which occupies the annals of English poetry from Surrey to Spenser, entitled _A Mirrour for Magistrates_.”[2] I. After this general character of the work, the first step in our particular discussion leads us to its origin. This was confessedly LYDGATE’S _Fall of Princes_, an origin which is very striking, and still enhances the high merit so eloquently ascribed to it by Warton, when we recollect that the writer to whom it thus owed its foundation, has been pronounced by a shrewd critic one “who disgraced the name and patronage of his master Chaucer.”[3] But so decisive and intimate was this origin of a work, which had so important an effect on our national poetry, that when first planned, it seems intended to have been embodied in the same volume with the translation by Lydgate.