LYDGATE AND COVERDALE, AND THEIR BIOGRAPHERS

Dan John Lydgate, as Warton truly observes, was not only the poet of his monastery, but of the world in general. Yet how has he been treated by his biographers? Ritson, in his *Bibliographia Poetica*, says, "he died at an advanced age, after 1446." Thomson, in his *Chronicles of London Bridge*, 2nd edition, p. 11., says, "Lydgate died in the year 1440, at the age of sixty;" and again, at p. 164. of the same work, he says, "Lydgate was born about 1375, and died about 1461!" Pitt says that he died in 1482; and the author of the *Suffolk Garland*, p. 247., prolongs his life (evidently by a typogr…