This excerpt from the prologue to Lydgate's Fall of Princes is one of many paeans addressed to Geoffrey Chaucer by the fifteenth-century poet. Having just posed the question ‘who shal be my muse, / Or onto whom shal I for helpe calle?’ (239–40), Lydgate only briefly mentions an actual muse, Calliope, before turning to the poet who seems to have been his personal muse: ‘he that was of makyng souereyne, / Whom al this land sholde off riht preferre, / Sithe off oure language he was the lodesterre’ (250–2). Both here and elsewhere in his works, Lydgate took it upon himself to forge a durable link between his own writings and the name of his predecessor, retroactively adopting the dead Chaucer as his ‘maistir’. His efforts range from citing the Monk's Tale in the first and last books of the Fall of Princes (I.349–50, IX.3427) to inserting himself among Chaucer's pilgrims in the prologue to the Siege of Thebes, which is then figured as Lydgate's own Canterbury tale.