“Owl and the Nightingale.”

  Nicholas de Guildford, (fl. 1250), poet, is the supposed author of an English poem, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” which takes the form of a contest between the two birds as to their relative merits of voice and singing. Master Nicholas de Guildford is chosen as umpire, and we then learn that his home is at Porteshom (now Portisham) in Dorset. Master Nicholas has very commonly been supposed to be the author himself, but Professor Ten Brink argues that the manner in which his many virtues are dwelt on makes this improbable, and suggests that the author was a friend of Guildford’s…. There are two manuscripts of “The Owl and the Nightingale;” (1) MS. Cotton Caligula A. ix., of the first half of the thirteenth century; (2) MS. Jesus Coll. Oxford, 29 (Coxe, Cat. MSS. Coll. Oxon), about fifty years later. Dr. Stratmann considers that the two copies are independent. The poem has been thrice edited: by Mr. Stevenson for the Roxburghe Club, 1838, by Mr. T. Wright for the Percy Society, 1842 (vol. xi.), and by Dr. F. H. Stratmann, Krefeld, 1868.

  Probably written not long after the year 1200. Its author, I have little doubt, was John of Guildford; for it follows (in the Oxford MS.) a poem, that was avowedly written by him; and the praises it bestows upon Nichol of Guildford, could only have proceeded from one, who was an intimate and friend. The two were probably fellow-townsmen.

  The earliest known narrative poem, of a wholly imaginative character, conceived in the native tongue after the Saxon period.

  Although the poem is full of wisdom, the moral is not obtruded, as is the rule in mediæval work. The contending sides are balanced with wonderful skill, and the verse, which is the French short rimed couplet, is as smooth as any that Chaucer wrote.

  The earliest work in which we find the simple octosyllabic couplet used with any degree of artistic skill is the remarkable poem called “The Hule and the Nightingale,” a composition which deserves attention for other than metrical reasons…. In “The Hule and the Nightingale,” however, we make the acquaintance of a mind which has attempted to think for itself, and an invention capable of shaping discursive fancies and sentiments in a poetical mould…. But whatever the meaning of the writer may have been, he was certainly a poet capable of forming a clear conception of his subject, and of giving expression to it in a well-proportioned composition. The characters and arguments of the disputing birds are well distinguished, and the slight dramatic touches with which the narrative is enlivened are in excellent taste. Not only has the author shown real power of invention in adapting the allegorical spirit of the Bestiary to his own ends, but he has understood how to combine the clerical spirit of these manuals with the romance of the Breton lay. When he borrows for his argument an anecdote from Alexander of Neckham, he shows an appreciation of the improvements made in the story by the colours added in the version of Marie of France. The influence of French models is indeed very noticeable throughout the poem, not indeed in the vocabulary, which is singularly archaic, but in the syntax, where the words closely follow the order of the thought, and in the rhythm, which, both in the distribution of the accent and in the number of the syllables in each verse, shows a careful study of the style of Marie.

  On the whole, this is the best example of the octosyllabical couplet to be found before the fourteenth century. The poet (who, by the way, quotes “Alfred” repeatedly, and little else) occasionally commits the fault—specially unpleasing to modern English ears, but natural at his early date, and probably connected with the indifference of his French originals to identical rhymes—of making the same rhyme do for two successive couplets; but this does not occur often enough to interfere seriously with harmony. His variations from eights to sevens are not more than the genius of the language specially allows. His style is easy and his poetical imagery and apparatus generally, though comparatively simple, well at command, and by no means of a rude or rudimentary order.