The book itself, _Lytill Johan_, is by a disciple of Lydgate's--see l.
366, p. 36-7--and contains, besides, the usual directions how to dress,
how to behave in church, at meals, and when serving at table, a wise
man's advice on the books his little Jack should read, the best English
poets,--then Gower, Chaucer, Occleve, and Lydgate,--not the Catechism
and Latin Grammar. It was very pleasant to come off the directions not
to conveye spetell over the table, or burnish one's bones with one's
teeth, to the burst of enthusiasm with which the writer speaks of our
old poets. He evidently believed in them with all his heart; and it
would have been a good thing for England if our educators since had
followed his example. If the time wasted, almost, in Latin and Greek by
so many middle-class boys, had been given to Milton and Shakspere,
Chaucer and Langland, with a fit amount of natural science, we should
have been a nobler nation now than we are. There is no more promising
sign of the times than the increased attention paid to English in
education now.

But to return to our author. He gives Chaucer the poet's highest gift,
Imagination, in these words,

what ever to say he toke in his entente,
his langage was so fayer & pertynante,
yt semeth vnto manys heryng
_not only the worde, but veryly the thyng_. (l. 343.)

And though the writer has the bad taste to praise Lydgate more than
Chaucer, yet we may put this down to his love for his old master, and
may rest assured that though the cantankerous Ritson calls the Bury
schoolmaster a 'driveling monk,' yet the larking schoolboy who robbed