In Middle English the rigor of the French form is relaxed. The ballade is found occasionally, it is true, cast in the mould most commonly used in France. For example, Lydgate's Flour of Courtesye, with its three similar stanzas and envoy of fewer lines than the stanzas, its uniform rhyme scheme and refrain, is in form like hundreds of French ballades. But many of the Middle English poems are three-stanza ballades, with identical rhymes and refrains, but without envoys, thus resembling the French form before the puy had modified it. Thus the ballade in Middle English, as in fourteenthcentury French, may or may not have an envoy. The envoy may be of fewer lines than the stanza or of the same number. In the French ballade it is clear that there is a considerable variety in line structure, but in Middle English, on the contrary, the almost invariable line is composed of ten syllables.

The scribes of the Lydgate manuscripts used the term balade most frequently to mark the stanzaic lyric of indefinite length, although, as we have seen, this poet produced ballades in the stricter sense of the word as well. Particularly in the Fall of Princes are there ballades of seven-line and eight-line stanzas, with and without envoys.

In the Prologue to the Fall of Princes, Lydgate wrote:

This sayd Poete my master in his dayes
Made and compiled ful many a frensh dittie
Complants, ballades, roundels, vyrelayes
Full delectable to heare and to se:

For whiche men should of ryght and equitie,
Syth he in englysh in making was the best,

Pray vnto God to geue his soule good rest.

And with lyrics, wrought in the French fashion, in honor of Love, Alcestis credits Chaucer in both versions of the prologues to the Legend of Good Women.

And many an ympne for your halydayes,
That highten Balades, Roundels, Virelayes.

The "Virelayes" have vanished, the "Roundels" survive in four specimens only, but sixteen "Balades" are still

extant.

Of this number, two are compound ballades, namely, Fortune and The Compleynt of Venus. Fortune comprises really three ballades. The most striking features of the poem are its insistence on the adequacy of the individual to cope with things; the challenge contained in the line, "for fynally, Fortune, I thee defye"; and the boast that, "he that hath himself hath suffsaunce." One's first instinct is to search old records and accounts to discover whether Chaucer did "unlock his heart" here with a ballade-key. That he did is unlikely, in view of the conventional treatment of Lady Fortune in the Divine Comedy, in the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, and in the Roman de la Rose. It was one of the conventions of the Middle Ages to dwell on the revolutions of Fortune's Wheel. Plainly, in this triple ballade, Chaucer was making use of a popular French verse form; he was using it, moreover, to incorporate ideas derived from the Roman de la Rose, and from the Consolation of Philosophy. The form is fixed and the ideas in the main are medieval commonplaces, yet Chaucer's dramatic assertion of his valiancy in the face of disaster is effective. Chaucer's other triple ballade, the Compleynt of Venus, differs somewhat in form from Fortune. Only the envoy is Chaucer's. The ballades are translations, with trifling alterations, from the French.

To Rosemounde is a single ballade. The refrain runs, "Though ye to me ne do no daliaunce," and refers to the aloofness of Rosemounde. The ballade is familiar verse in the gayest vein with mock heroic touches:

Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne
As I in love am walwed and y-wounde;
For which ful ofte I of my-self divyne
That I am trewe Tristam the secounde.

Again, in Truth, or the Balade de Bon Conseyl, as in the case of Fortune, the main source of the poem seems to be Boethius. Indeed, in lines 8 and 9,

Tempest thee noght al croked to redresse,

In trust of hir that turneth as a bal,

we have another reference to the medieval conception of Fortune's wheel. The refrain,

And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede,

was no doubt suggested by, "The truth shall make you free" (John, viii, 32). The tone of the Balade de Bon Conseyl contrasts strongly with the tone in Fortune.

That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,
The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal,

is the expression of failure and discouragement; it is not the cry of one who would say,

I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,

The best and the last!

The ideas in Gentilesse, a Moral Balade of Chaucier, as in the case notably of Fortune, presented themselves to Chaucer's mind from the Consolation of Philosophy and from the Roman de la Rose. Chaucer took his theory of Gentilesse from contemporary standards, yet his application of the theory is his own.

In Lak of Stedfastnesse Chaucer used the French form with an animus different from that found in his other ballades. In Fortune, in Truth, and in Gentilesse,

he uses the ballade seriously, it is true, but in Lak of Stedfastnesse he makes it a means of expressing the social confusion and the unrest of his day. The refrain, "That al is lost for lak of sted fastnesse,❞ occurs at the end of all the stanzas, but appears as, "And wed thy folk agein to sted fastnesse," at the end of the envoy. According to one manuscript, "This balade made Geffrey Chauciers the Laureall Poete of Albion and sente it to his souerain lorde kynge Richarde the secounde thane being in his Castell of Windesore." It is believed to have been written in the later years of Richard II's reign, when he was outraging the people by his acts and policies. If the poem was dispatched to the king at this epoch in his activities, the sentiments of the envoy were certainly timely. Chaucer, as has often been remarked, only occasionally reflects the social discontents of his day; his outlook on life is plainly not that of a professional reformer, but certainly in this ballade he pauses to analyze the source of evil in his age. If the general idea of the ballade be taken from Boethius, one can only say that the old philosopher's Consolation furnished Chaucer merely with a point of departure.

The envoy of The Compleynt of Chaucer to his Empty Purse is usually considered the last piece of writing done by Chaucer, for it contains a direct appeal to Henry IV, who was accepted by Parliament September 30, 1399; as a result of the poet's appeal, he was in all probability granted an additional forty marks yearly on October third or thirteenth of the same year. A similar complaint was addressed to the French king, John II, by Guillaume de Machault in 1351-6, in short rhymed lines, but Chaucer may more likely have been imitating a similar ballade appeal made by Eustache Deschamps after the death of Charles V of France, and the accession of Charles VI, who had promised Deschamps a pension but failed to keep his promise.

Against Women Unconstant, or Newfanglenesse, as it is also called, uses the refrain, "In stede of blew, thus may ye were al grene." It is an adaptation of Machault's, "Qu'en lieu de bleu, Dame, vous vestez vert." Beside this similarity, the French and the English ballade are alike in stanza form and in the absence of an envoy. But they are dissimilar in tone. Chaucer grimly arraigns a lady in the whole-souled fashion so popular in the Middle Ages, when satire alternated with adulation, whereas Machault's reproaches are without spirit in comparison, and his theme is the theatrical havoc wrought in his constitution by the fickleness of his dame.

In 1894 was printed what is generally accepted as a genuine Chaucerian ballade, Womanly Noblesse. The envoy and each of the three stanzas end differently. If this ballade be Chaucer's, he certainly departs widely from his usual custom of following closely the fixed French form. There is no such thing as transcending form if the artistic problem is to restrain the development of the theme by the exigencies of a certain fixed type. Chaucer, if it be Chaucer, certainly gained nothing by the looseness of construction in his poem. To a fifteenth-century reader it must have been annoying to be disappointed of a refrain at the end of every stanza.

In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women occurs what is probably the best known of Chaucer's ballades. The ballade appears in both versions of the Prologue. In one version, the refrain runs, "Alceste is here, that al that may desteyne"; in the other, “My lady cometh, that al this may disteyne." The most striking feature of the poem is its use of proper names. The French ballade writers, as has been pointed out, conventionally introduced these lists, which were in reality a medieval device, for throwing a glamor of romance about the subject. There is a striking resemblance between the ballade of Chaucer's here reprinted and that