the narrow sea, and that into the wide ocean. And so the ashes of Wyclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all the world over."

Chaucer Contrasted with Langland. The peasant rebellion and the Lollard agitation give us glimpses of an England which Chaucer, in spite of the many-sidedness of his work, did not reveal. Chaucer wrote for the court and the cultivated classes, to whom the sufferings of the poor were either unknown, or accepted as a part of the natural order of things. In his graceful worldliness, his delight in the bright pageantry of life, he shows the Norman-French strain, with its large infusion of Celtic blood; the other half of the English nature, its mystical, sombre, spiritually earnest side, found expression in William Langland, author of the Book Concerning Piers the Plowman. He proceeds from the pure Germanic strain in the nation, and is the representative of those moral and spiritual traits which afterward came to be known as Puritan.

V. LANGLAND AND THE VISION OF PIERS PLOWMAN

Langland's Life and Character.-William Langland was born at Colesbury Mortimer, near Malvern in Worcestershire, not far from the Welsh border. He tells us that "his father and friends" put him to school, and made a clerk of him. For a time he "roamed about robed in russet," in the manner of a mendicant, driven by vague thoughts and desires. Going up to London, he got him a "chantry for souls," one of the minor offices of the medieval Church, his duty being to chant at stated intervals for the release from purgatory of the soul of some dead man, who had left a bequest for that purpose. His poverty was extreme. With his wife Kitte and his daughter Calote, he lived in Cornhill, where his tall, gaunt figure, clothed in a sombre priestly cloak, got him the nickname of "Long Will." As he stalked through the crowded Strand, he would refuse to bow to fine lords and ladies clad in furs and silver, and to cry "God save you, sir!" to sergeants of the law. His conduct toward the rich and great, so unusual in that day, got him the name of an

eccentric person, somewhat touched in the brain. Hints of mental struggles verging upon insanity occur in his confessions. "My wit waxed and waned," he says, "until I was a fool." His writings reveal a half-ferocious sincerity, a flaming indignation against the pretences and base complacencies of the world, combined with the inward exaltation of the visionary. The last trace we get of him is in Bristol, where, in 1399, he was writing "Richard the Redeless," a poem of protest and warning addressed to King Richard II. Apparently, news reached him of the assassination of the king and of the usurpation of the throne by Henry IV., and he threw the poem by unfinished. The date of his death is unknown.

"The Book of Piers the Plowman."-Langland's life-work was his great poem, "The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman." He worked upon it for at least thirty years, constantly rewriting and expanding it. In these rewritings and recastings it grew from eight cantos to twenty-three; and the conception of the chief character, “Piers the Plowman," grew constantly more exalted. At first he is merely an honest, simple-hearted farmer, full of Christian helpfulness and practical justice. But in the later versions he is raised and glorified, and is conceived of mystically as Jesus Christ, incarnate in the form of a lowly tiller of the fields.

On a May morning, on Malvern Hills, the poet, "weary forwandered," lics down to rest, and dreams. Beneath him, in the great plain, he sees gathered together a vast crowd of people, representing the manifold life of the world. All are busy, but their work is, with few exceptions, evil or futile. Some are sowing or ploughing, but only that idlers may waste the fruit of their toil. Pilgrims are journeying to holy shrines, that they may "lie all their lives after;" minstrels and ribald story-tellers are plying their trade; friars and pardoners are abusing their priestly station for their own low ends. Lawsergeants, tradesmen, and taverners mix with the changing crowd, and contribute each his characteristic abuse. The genius of the crowd, the incarnation of the worldly spirit, is Lady Meed (Bribery), a wonderful allegorical figure, symbol of that dishonesty which Langland everywhere saw poisoning the springs of social and political life.

Next we are shown the "Seven Deadly Sins," and other allegorical figures, painted with so much realism, that they seem like living beings, with whom, indeed, they mingle on equal terms. Among them is Piers, and to him they appeal to show them the way to Truth, i.e., to God the Father. Piers knows Truth well, but refuses to go until he has ploughed his half-acre. All who come asking for guidance he sets to work. Many shirk their tasks, but are driven back by Hunger. This part of the poem preaches, as preparatory to personal salvation, the Gospel of Work—the same gospel which Carlyle, who has many points of resemblance to Langland, was to preach five centuries afterward.

The Vision reaches its highest point of imagination in the account of Piers's triumph over Death and Hell. He comes riding barefoot on an ass, without spurs or spear, to his "joust in Jerusalem." With the news of his triumph and resurrection, the dreamer awakes in ecstasy, the joyous Easter bells pealing in his ears.

Spirit of Langland's Poem.-The name of Piers Plowman was used as a rallying cry in the peasant uprising; and the poem probably had much to do with the arousing of Wyclif's zeal as a reformer. Langland's sense of the equality of all men before God, his hatred of social falsities and hypocrisies, his belief in the dignity of labor, give a modern tone to his poem, in spite of his archaic metrical form, and its mediaval machinery of abstract figures. His deep religious sense and the grandeur of his mystical imaginings are neither ancient nor modern, but of all time.

VI. FROM CHAUCER TO THE RENAISSANCE

The Chaucerian Imitators: Lydgate and Occleve. After the death of Chaucer and Langland, literature declined. Poets, in the dearth of original inspiration, kept turning back to Chaucer, as to their "fader dere and maister reverent," and imitating him both in matter and manner. of these disciples was John Lydgate, a monk of Bury St. Edmunds (1370?-1451?). Another, Thomas Occleve or Hoccleve (1370?-1450?) had the benefit of Chaucer's per

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sonal acquaintance and instruction, loved and mourned him deeply, and preserved, in the manuscript of his "Governail of Princes" (written for the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry V.), the portrait of Chaucer as a gray-haired old man, hooded and gowned.

James of Scotland: "The King's Quair."-Another poet who continued the master's tradition is the young Stuart prince, afterward James I. of Scotland, who was captured by English sailors in 1405, and spent the next nineteen years in England as a prisoner, in the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, and other strongholds. At the time of his capture he was a child of eleven. As he grew up in solitude, he turned for diversion to poetry and music. One day, from the windows of Windsor Castle, he saw a beautiful young girl walking in the garden below, as Palamon saw the fair Emilie in the "Knight's Tale." The story of his love for Jane Beaufort and its happy outcome, the young prince told with tenderness and fancy in The King's Quair (i.e., The King's Little Book). The King's Quair is, with all its artificiality of manner, a poem which can still be read with delight by reason of its fresh feeling; and our pleasure in it is increased by the modesty of the royal poet, who speaks of it as his "litel boke, nakit (naked) of eloquence."

Popular Literature: Ballads and Miracle Plays.-While the poetry of the cultivated classes languished, the poetry of the people, not yet written down, but passing from mouth to mouth and generation to generation in the form of ballads, took on a new life. It was probably during the course of the fifteenth century that a great number of those ballads arose, which mirror faithfully the life of the people, and which remain to-day as fresh and moving in their simple beauty, as poignant in their pathos, and as heart-stirring in their rude power, as when they were first sung. "Chevy Chase," "Sir Patrick Spens," "The Nut-Brown Maid," "Young Waters," "Edward, Edward," "The Wife of Usher's Well," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet," and other poems of the great ballad-making time, are among the most precious possessions of our literature; and they will continue to be more precious the further the race removes

itself from the primitive conditions of life under which they arose. The fifteenth century also marks the growth of another form of literature, the miracle play, which sprang almost as directly from the life of the common people as did the ballads.*

Fifteenth Century Prose: Sir Thomas Malory.-In prose the fifteenth century produced one work which has much of the elevation and splendor of great poetry, the Morte D'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory. Malory was a knight, a gentleman of an ancient house, with its seat at Newbold Revell, Warwickshire. As a young man he served in France, in the military retinue of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, a warrior in whom lived again the knightly ideal of a former age, and who was known by the romantic title of "Father of Courtesy." Such a lineage and training fitted Malory peculiarly for his task of combining in a great prosepoem the legends of King Arthur and the Round Table, which he gathered from Geoffrey of Monmouth (see Chap. III) and the French trouvères. By good fortune he was master of a simple, flowing English style, very flexible and musical. The only example which he had for such a use as he made of the new English prose, was in the famous Travels of Sir John Mandeville, compiled in French by Jean de Bourgogne, and translated into English late in the fourteenth century. The translator of these fictitious "Travels" is unknown, but whoever he was, he threw his marvellous tales of giant sheep, human beings with dogs' faces, "anthropaphagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," into a simple, lucid prose, which, while lacking the terseness and energy of Wyclif's popular sermons, was a good instrument for the everyday-work of literature. This instrument Malory took up; but in response to the superior dignity and beauty of his subject, he raised it to a higher power. The Morte D'Arthur was finished in 1467, but was not printed until 1485, when Caxton, the first English printer, published it with an interesting preface from his own hand.

*We shall study the Miracle Play later, when we come to discuss the beginnings of the regular drama.