on Malvern hills," we should expect it to be written in a rambling fashion. And it is. But its incoherence may be due as much to the fact that its author wavers constantly between his highly serious and his very comic views of life. Due to the persistence of the idea that the religious and moral life must be a sad and somber one, the commentators upon Langland too often overlook the fact that comic description occupies much of the space within the Vision. The work is filled with typical characters drawn from ordinary life, and is in reality a search after the truths important to human existence. This book was followed by Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, also by Langland. Do Well, Do Bet, and Do Best are characters in the end identified with Jesus Christ, who is Love dressed as Piers Plowman. The poem should be carefully read along with the writings of Chaucer, by the student who desires to secure a full-rounded picture of English society in the fourteenth century, for it gives the side of life which Chaucer neglects.

While there may have been mild and unessential heresy in the author of the Pearl, it remained for Wycliffe to become England's first real Protestant in connection with a doctrine which was considered vital by the Church, the doctrine of transubstantiation, or of the changing of the bread and wine of the sacrament into the body and blood of Christ. Wycliffe's battle with the papal authority was a serious one. As reformers who are at all successful usually do, he appealed to the common people in their own speech, going to what the papacy at that time considered the excessive length of translating the New Testament into the English tongue, and directing and himself working upon a part of the translation of the Old Testament. The excellent English of both, however, is due to the labors of a much-overlooked man, John Purvey, who revised the whole, doing it, though, under the authority of Wycliffe himself,

John Gower was a learned and talented man, but greatly lacking the genius of either Langland or Chaucer. He wrote in French, in Latin, and in English. He was, like Langland, a story-teller, and a religious and social reformer. His age needed more interesting reformers than he, however. In 1393 was written his Confessio Amantis; in spite of its title, it was in the English tongue. While it should be said in favor of the book that it is a larger, and a better, collection of tales than any which had preceded it in English, yet the reader generally agrees with James Russell Lowell that the writings of Gower are most aptly called "works."

2. Chaucer

The influences making Chaucer. Ruskin has brilliantly made the claim for the thirteenth century that it was the greatest century in the world's history.. It certainly was a century in which the arts, especially in Italy and in France, attained in many instances heights which they have not again attained. If that century has any rivals in the arts, they are two only, the third century before Christ and the sixteenth after. However, the first of these was confined in its culture to so limited an area, Greece alone, and the second had within it so many elements of decay, that it is not difficult for many to agree with Ruskin that the thirteenth century, with its highly speculative theology and philosophy, its foundation of many of the world's greatest universities, its building of the world's most wonderful cathedrals, the century of Dante," the Central Man of all the World," was the foremost in the production of those things which have refined human existence. This is the century which preceded Chaucer, and helped, through its literature chiefly, more than all other things combined, to make Chaucer what he Chaucer was born about the year 1340.

was.

Chaucer is one of the finest and greatest of literary artists. It is customary to divide his work into that of a French, an Italian, and an English period. But while this is a considerable aid to the memory in classifying his writings, it is a misleading device. The studies of Chaucer in Italian literature and his residence for short periods in Genoa, Pisa, Florence, and the cities of Lombardy were important. They brought him into contact with the productions of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. They opened up to him the strong and stirring way of telling exquisite stories which those men had inherited from the classics of antiquity. But this does not prove that he became Italianate. He did not merely copy Italian work. Among his earliest productions, before the so-called "Italian period" in his life, he had already employed "heroic " verse (the five-foot rhymed couplet), the ten-syllable line, and the narrative stanza, all of which he is so often said to have copied from Italy. Chaucer was an independent genius in his methods, influenced, of course, by all that he experienced, but never a mere imitator.

He owes much more to France than to Italy; and this is due not alone to the fact that he was brought up in the Frenchified court of Edward III, but also to the fact that it was the literature of thirteenth-century France that was dominating all artistic authorship in his day. English literature had been in its achievements not only behind in time but below in quality the literature of France. But in Chaucer it was raised to the level of the best that France had produced; and in England in his works, as well as in Italian and French literature, the fine spirit of courtesy and grace, which was the ideal of the Middle Ages, found high and notable culmination.

Chaucer's life. As is the case with most that has been written about the life of Shakespeare, so it is with most that has been written about the life of Chaucer; it consists, in both cases,

of guesses. A few facts concerning the life of Chaucer are all that are known. In youth he was a page at court. It was during this time that the Black Prince brought the French king a prisoner to London, in 1357. Later, in 1359, Chaucer went with the army of Edward III in his invasion of France. He was made a prisoner, and was held by the French for a few months. It is recorded that sixteen pounds were paid by the king towards his ransom. Like Shakespeare, Chaucer had some business acumen, it would seem. At least he became a customs official, as the nineteenth-century Hawthorne did in America; though the Englishman seems to have been a much more active occupant of his office than the American of his. Chaucer saw much of political turmoil: the controversy over administrative reforms which centered about the Good Parliament of 1376; Wat Tyler's Rebellion in 1380, which was a peasants' revolt; the absolutism, and finally the dethronement of Richard II. He saw much of ecclesiastical and religious strife: the beheading of the Archbishop of Canterbury by the rebellious peasants; the Lollard movement, partly political and partly socialistic; and the movement toward reform, under Wycliffe. He saw the beginnings of modern ideas in the literature about him; not much that was modern in Gower, but a great deal in Langland and in Wycliffe, -and as for himself, he, along with Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, is one of the poets whose ideas are primarily those of all time.

His relation to the people. One of his biographers has written and many others have written similar things that "Chaucer was not a poet of the people." This is said because Chaucer did not write harshly about the darker side of the life of the common people. But surely his subtle irony in the description of the qualities of the mind and life of those who were responsible for the sufferings of the poor is not a less effective

weapon than the uncouth and harsh denunciations by the author of Piers Plowman. He does not directly moralize in any of his Tales, excepting in that of the Canon's Yeoman and in that of the Manciple, but, as Goethe has said, “If there is a moral in the subject, it will appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective and artistic treatment of his subject; if he has as high a soul as Sophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what he will." The facts are that Chaucer saw much of the people and sympathetically understood what he saw, and then vividly and clearly pictured the chief aspects of the life of the most typical individuals whom he had seen. His effect upon the language. Chaucer translated considerably from other languages into his own; he also adapted much that he found in other languages. He handled all this material in a scholarly fashion. But he was one who, in what he adapted and brought directly over from other languages as well as in what he invented, reveals that he saw not with the physical eye alone, but also with his imagination and with his reason. As a great poet, he wrote down his thought, his convictions, and his visions, in diction and phraseology that was the richest, most beautiful, and most effective that had yet been employed in England. This had a notable effect upon the language of the day.

The language of the Anglo-Saxons was a Teutonic language, one of the many branches of the Indo-European tongue which spread from India to the west of Ireland. The Anglo-Saxon language had been, in the northern part of England, much modified by the invasion of the Danes during the eighth and ninth centuries. In the south it had been much modified by the Norman Conquest in the latter part of the eleventh century. The Danes had introduced more and slightly different Teutonic words and phrases; the Normans introduced the French, not a

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