Excerpt from Hoccleve's Works, Vol. 2: The Minor Poems in the Ashburnham Ms. Addit. 133 This brochure must be regarded as merely supplementary to Dr. F urnivall's Minor Poems of Hoccleve, vol. I, from the Phillipps and Durham mss. Owing to certain difficulties, he had been unable to include the Ashburnham poems. Through the good offices of a friend I had obtained permission to study and use the MS and discovered that it contained some poems hitherto unknown. I wished Dr. Furnivall to add the contents of the volume to his projected edition of Hoccleve's works, but with characteristic generosity he would not accept my sugges tion. Later on, the ms. Was sold, and passed into the posses sion of Mr. George Dunn, of Woolley Hall, near Maidenhead, and ultimately, by good fortune, became mine. An account of the Hoccleve portion of the ms. Will be found in the Introduc tion to Dr. Furnivall's volume. Bound up with it is a ms, written in 1386, of homiletic prose and verse. Another, copy of the 'legend of the Virgin and her Sleeveless Garment, ' is found in ms. CLII, Christ Church, Oxford, containing the Canterbury Tales, where it is given erroneously as the Plough man's Tale; see Dr. Beatty's edition of the tale, 'a New Ploughman's Tale, ' Chaucer Society, 1902. In addition to its value as preserving poems of Hoccleve otherwise unrepresented, the present ms. Is of importance as giving the best text of the Letter of Cupid; cp. Skeat, Chaucer's Works, vol. VII. Altogether, the ms. Is a delightful little volume of Hoccleve's minor poems, linked together so as to form a connected series. It is a beautiful specimen of early fifteenth-century writing. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.