after his own heart, was fairly seated on the throne, he probably felt himself yet more free to lay aside the self-imposed task of setting right the world, and to occupy himself with a purely literary task in the language and style which he felt to be most suitable for a court. In any case it seems certain that some at least of the balades were composed with a view to the court of Henry IV, and the collection assumed its present shape probably in the year of his accession, 1399, for we know that either in the first or the second year of Henry IV the poet became blind and ceased to write. FORM AND VERSIFICATION.--The collection consists of a Dedication addressed to Henry IV, fifty-one (not fifty) balades of love (one number being doubled by mistake), then one, unnumbered, addressed to the Virgin, and a general Envoy. The balades are written in stanzas of seven or eight lines, exactly half of the whole fifty-four (including the Dedication) belonging to each arrangement. The seven-line stanza rhymes _ab ab bcc_ with Envoy _bc bc_, or in three instances _ab ab baa_, Envoy _ba ba_; the eight-line stanza ordinarily _ab ab bc bc_ with Envoy _bc bc_, but also in seven instances _ab ab ba ba_ with Envoy _ba ba_. The form is the normal one of the balade, three stanzas with rhymes alike and an Envoy; but in one case, _Bal._ ix, there are five stanzas with Envoy, and in another, xxxii, the Envoy is wanting. Also the balade addressed to the Virgin, which is added at the end, is without Envoy, and there follows a general Envoy of seven lines, rhyming independently and referring to the whole collection. The balade form is of course taken from Continental models, and the metre of the verse is syllabically correct like that of the _Mirour_. As was observed however about the octosyllabic line of the _Mirour_, so it may be said of the ten-syllable verse here, that the rhythm is not exactly like that of the French verse of the Continent. The effect is due, as before remarked, to the attempt to combine the English accentual with the French syllabic measure. This is especially visible in the treatment of the caesura. In the compositions of the French writers of the new poetry--Froissart, for example--the ten- (or eleven-) syllable line has regularly a break after the fourth syllable. This fourth syllable however may be either accented or not, that is, either as in the line, ‘Se vous voulez aucune plainte faire,’ or as in the following, ‘Prenez juge qui soit de noble afaire.’ The weaker form of caesura shown in this latter line occurs in at least ten per cent. of the verses in this measure which Froissart gives in the _Trésor Amoureux_, and the case is much the same with the _Balades_ of Charles d’Orléans, a generation later. Gower, on the other hand, does not admit the unaccented syllable (mute _e_ termination) in the fourth place at all; no such line as this, ‘De ma dame que j’aime et ameray,’