LYDGATE, JOHN, an ancient English poet, one of the successors of Chaucer, was a monk of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. The dates of only a few of the events of his life have been ascertained. lie was ordained a subdeacon in 1389, a deacon in 1393, and a priest in 1397; whence it has been conjectured that he was born about 1375. Warton says he seems to have arrived at his greatest eminence about 1430. After a short education at Oxford, he travelled into France and Italy, and returned a complete master of the language and literature of both countries. He chiefly studied Dante, Boccaccio, and Alain Chartier, and became so distinguished a proficient in polite learning, that he opened a school in hie monastery for teaching the sons of the nobility versification and composition. Although philology was his subject, he was not unacquainted with the philosophy of the day : he was not only a poet and a rhetorician, but a geometrician, an astronomer, a theologist, and a disputant. Warton was of opinion that Lydgate "made considerable additions to those amplifications of our language, in which Chaucer, Gower, and Occleve led the way ; " and that he was the first of our writers whose style was clothed with that perspicuity in which the English phraseology appears at this day to an English reader.
To enumerate Lydgate's pieces would be to write the catalogue of a little library ; Ritson, in his Bibliographia Poetics,' has given a list of no fewer than two hundred and fifty-one. No poet seems to have
possessed greater versatility. His most esteemed works are his 'Story of Thebes,' his ' Fall of Princes,' and his 'History, Siege, and Destruc tion of Troy.' The first is printed by Spight in his edition of Chaucer ; the second, the 'Fall of Princes,' or ' Boke of Johan Roches' (first printed by Pyneon in 1494, and several times eiuce), is a translation from Boccaccio, or rather from a French paraphrase of his work, 'De Casibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium." The History of Troy' was first printed by Pynson in 1513, hut more correctly by Marshes in 1555, and was once the most popular of his works.
A pension of 71. 13a. 4d. for life was granted to Lydgate by King Henry VL in 1440, probably upon the presentation to that monarch, when he visited St. Edmunds Bury, of a manuscript Life of St. Edmund, the patron saint of the monastery. Thie manuscript is still preserved in the Harleian collection in the British Museum, No. 2278, and is one of the most splendidly illuminated manuscripts in that great repository which also contains in the old Royal, Cottonian, Harlcian, and Lans downe collections, other splendid manuscripts of Lydgate's various poems.
A note in Wanley's part of the Harleian Catalogue of Manuscripts' seems to insinuate that Lydgate did not die till 1482, which is impro bable. He was certainly alive in 1446; and the best authorities place his death about. 1461.