of the unimpaired medieval beauty. The father of modern English poetry, such is his unquestioned title; the master of the Elizabethans, the source and fountain-head of what is commonly called English literature. But the birth of modern English poetry meant the decay and extinction of the medieval literature which was even more intimately English, and in especial of that copious and distinguished Middle-English poetry which has a continuous history from a time before England was a single kingdom, and which, after it rallied from the check of the Norman Conquest, rose in the thirteenth and earlier fourteenth century to a really national importance. Its last, and perhaps its most distinguished figure occurs now, just before it disappears, in William Langland, the name assigned by a somewhat doubtful deduction from imperfect evidence to the author of 'The Vision of Piers Ploughman.'

This poem is the most important surviving example of the Middle-English language, using its own native poetical form, that of alliterative verse, at the time when it had reached its last development before being superseded by the foreign metres which the genius of Chaucer made decisively predominant. It embodies, almost for the last time, that organised and coherent system of political and theological thought which to the mediæval mind gave a complete account of the whole of human life. And it presents a picture, at once vivid and convincing, of the actual England of the time, the aspect of things and the life of people in the period between the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses, when the whole framework of the Middle Ages yet stood, but was penetrated throughout by the stirring of modern forces.

This picture is the more valuable because it is drawn, as it were, incidentally, without self-consciousness, and not under the prepossessions of any theory. The author belonged to the common people himself, and knew common England like an open book. The life of the Court, the ordinances of chivalry, the romantic side of feudalism, he only saw from a distance and without sympathy, as a villager might look on at a tournament, or glance, as he passed by on his daily work, through the open door of a castle. But what actually met his eyes as he wandered over England-the life of the landowners in their manor-houses, of the merchants and craftsmen of the towns, of the village communities, of the agricultural labourers who made up nine-tenths of the population, of the floating population of landless men,

outlaws, beggars, and thieves, of the clergy, priests, monks, and friars-all this he knew through and through, and all this he handles with extraordinary fidelity. He seldom sets himself to make a description; but his keenness of eye, his humour, and his mastery of terse and mordant expression, make the whole poem full of pictorial effects. I propose to put together from the poem alone, and without adding to it from other sources-though these exist in abundance-some account of English life as it was then.

First, however, a few words should be said as to the framework, if one may so call it, in which this life presented itself to Langland. Into his theological conceptions, or into his political idealsthough both of these colour the whole attitude of his mind towards life-the scope of a single lecture will hardly justify me in entering. But the world of his vision has certain broad and well-marked features of its own or, to put the same thing in different words, he has his own broad and well-marked way of looking at things. This may be best set forth in his own words, When the Vision comes upon him,' Fortune me fetched,' he says: And into the land of longing

Alone she me brought,

And in a mirror that hight middle-earth

She made me to behold.

'Son,' she said to me,

'Here might thou see wonders,

And know that thou covetest,

And come thereto, peradventure.'

This mirror of middle-earth, the visible universe between the two unseen worlds above and below it, lies clear before his full of bright colour and abundant life :

I saw the sun and the sea

And the sand after,

And where that birds and beasts,

By their mates yeden;

Wild worms in woods,

And wonderful fowls

With flecked feathers

And of fele colours.

And sithen I looked upon the sea,

And so forth upon the stars;

I saw flowers in the fryth

And their fair colours,

And how among the green grass

Growed so many hues.

eyes,

In this bright living world man has been set by his Maker:

For he is Father in faith,

And formed you all

Both with fell and with face,
And gave you five wits

For to worship him therewith
While that ye been here:

And therefore he hight the earth
To help you each one

Of woollen, of linen,

Of livelihood at need,
In measurable manner,

To make you at ease.

But human life is mingled of good and evil, with a perpetual bias towards evil:

Man and his mate
I might both behold;
Poverty and plenty,
Both peace and war.

Bliss and bale both

I saw all at once,

And how men tooken meed,

And mercy refused.

And the figure of Death the Conqueror, which is so seldom absent from the thought of the Middle Ages, overhangs the world with a sombre magnificence:

Death came driving after,
And all to dust pashed

Kings and knights,

Kaisers and popes,

Learned and lewd.

He let no man stand,

That he hit even,
That ever stirred after.

Many a lovely lady

And lemans of knights
Swooned and swelted

For sorrow of his dints.

To see much and suffer more,' he says elsewhere, in a phrase that may remind one of the stately modern melancholy of Matthew Arnold, is the lot which Nature assigns to the more favoured of

her children.

Such is the world, over all, to Langland. But his particular descriptions hardly

ever travel out of England.

There are a few

allusions in the poem to the French wars, perhaps the most fatal of all the demoralising influences which in this century broke

down the strength and virtue of medieval England: the unhappy English army shivering through the bitter winter in huts in Normandy, or plodding through pitiless rain over the great plains round Chartres; and the sordid pillage of the wretched French peasantry,

Poor men thou robbedst,

And bare their brass at thy back
To Calais to sell-

which Shakespeare, two hundred years later, in the play of King Henry V., makes the subject of a rather acid comedy, ending in tragic squalor when Nym and Bardolph are strung up with a penny cord by the provost-marshal. There is mention also of pilgrimages to foreign holy places-Rome, Bethlehem, the Holy Sepulchre, Egypt, Sinai, Galicia; and of the foreign traffic of the 1 great merchants:

I sent over sea

My servants to Bruges,

Or into Prussia land my prentice
My profit to waiten.

But apart from such incidents it is England, and England alone, that Langland describes, and that mainly in the Midland and Southern counties: London, the great seaport of Dover, Malvern in Worcestershire, which apparently was his own birthplace, Winchester, the shrine of St. Mary of Walsingham in Norfolk, and other places up and down between the Welsh Marches and the English Channel.

It was a country beautiful by nature, and then made still more beautiful by the overflowing wealth of medieval art. Round the villages, set among their closes and orchards and fenced meadows, lay the acres, a belt of unhedged strips of ploughland, and beyond these again the waste-forest, or wold, or fen, or moorland, according to the nature of the district. Among the forests of beeches and broad oaks which covered the lowlands Langland makes special mention of the huge hawthorns-such as I have once, and only once, seen in what is left of the royal forest of Wychwood in Oxfordshire-covered with drifts of snow in May, and giving winter pasture on their haws to herds of lank, sinewy swine. The countryside was full of wild life. Hunting to keep it down was part of the duty of the manorial lord to his tenantry. 'Go,' cries the ploughman to the knight,

Go, hunt hardily

To hares and to foxes,

To boars and to brocks,

That break down mine hedges;

And go affaite (= tame) thy falcons
Wild fowls to kill:

For such cometh to my croft

And croppeth my wheat.

Beyond all, it was a land of birds. As Langland went widewhere' (a beautiful expression for strolling through the country),

Walking mine one,
By a wild wilderness
And by a wood's side,
Bliss of the birds
Brought me asleep;

And under a lind upon a lawn
Leaned I a stounde,

To lith the lays

Those lovely fowls made.

Lo! he cries to God, in rapture at their music:

Lɔ! birds and beasts

That no bliss ne knoweth,
And wild worms in woods

Through winters thou them grievest;
And after thou sendest them summer
That is their sovereign joy,

And bliss to all that been

Both wild and tame.

The sovereign joy of summer' had then an importance in people's lives that we can hardly realise. The medieval winter was uncomfortable enough for the rich, and miserable beyond expression for the poor. Darkness and cold and want of proper food, monotonously borne for months in their windowless houses, cut off by want of roads from nearly all communication with the outer world, made them look forward to spring with a perfect passion.

Now, Lord, send summer
And some manner joy!

And, to take one little instance from this poem, 'cherry time,' the season of year when they first could have fresh fruit to eat, is as well understood a phrase as harvest time.

For the upper classes, indeed, life had become refined and luxurious beyond all former experience, and was made even more so by contrast with the increasing poverty of the poor. The feudal subordination of ranks had hardened into an oppressive