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_.
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