THE TIMES AND THE POET. I. THE Age of Beginnings, which gave to English letters a writer whose transcendent genius surpassed the conceptions of all previous intellectual toilers, and still holds rank second to that of the "myriad-minded" dramatist before whom every European writer bows as to a master, is worthy to be studied for its historic interest, because in it are found the springs of subsequent progress. The sun of spiritual and intellectual enfranchisement was beginning to appear above the horizon, and the darkness of the previous ages was slowly fading before its powerful rays. Every people seemed to be preparing for a step forward which should usher in an unexperienced life, brilliant by contrast with all previous eras, and already made radiant by the workings of an imagination not yet delivered from the bondage of superstition. 8 " 2 In Italy the great Poet of the Unseen had but lately gone behind the veil,1 and Petrarch and Boccaccio were inditing verses that were to make them ever remembered. Among the English the credulous Mandeville was pursuing those voyages of discovery by which he is now known; the author of "The Last Age was predicting the end of all things; the Parson of Lutterworth was preparing his version of the Bible, and bringing on a religious reformation; the Dreamer on the Malvern Hills 1 was giving poetic voice to the moanings of the miserable laboring classes; while the king was fighting his fruitless wars in France, the Black Prince was winning his spurs and honorably wearing them; the nobles were indulging in the pomp and circumstance of jousts and tourneys; and the Poet of the Gentles was standing by, eagerly noticing every step in the gay dance, or mingling in those scenes of court life and courtiers' work which it was soon to be his to satirize and send down to the ages in immortal verse. It is with the fourteenth century that we have to do. In its twenty-first year 1 Dante died in the autumn of 1321. 2 This gloomy production was long attributed to Wiclif. 8 Wiclif's version was finished at about the same time that the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales was written. The Vision concerning Piers the Plowman was issued and re issued, in three versions, from 1362 to 1399. the exiled Dante died broken-hearted at Ravenna, leaving, as the fruit of his years of distress, an immortal epic and a never-dying fame that his native Florence eagerly sought to grasp and preserve. A score of years later the Easter sun gilded the laurel crown that an admiring king and populace solemnly placed upon the brow of the mourning lover of Laura, as he stood in the Capitol at the imperial city. The same fourteenth century witnessed in Italy a revival of classical learning under the reformed Boccaccio, who became a public interpreter of Dante, as he already had been the first to make known anew the faithfulness of a Troilus, the fickleness of a Cressida, and the unfailing obedience of a Griselda, all of which characters were to be transplanted into our literature by the poet of the Canterbury Pilgrimage, who, indeed, re-illumined the torch of his poetic fervor at the altars of Italian genius. In England the fourteenth century saw the culmination of that spirit of chivalry which in its dry records on the pages of a Froissart is still capable of filling the imagination with pictures of brilliant tournaments and stately royal progresses, and in the poet's verse embalms torever the graces of fair women and the gentle deeds of strong men, who in a rude age battled for virtue and honor. The long reign of the third Edward saw all this magnificence and kindliness, but as it wore on it witnessed a change. Terrible plagues wasted the people; the Hundred Years' War made great taxes necessary, and these pressed heavily upon the hard-working and poorly paid laborers on the land; the king who had won cities in France lost them also; his chivalrous son went before him to the grave, and there arose a young ruler whose accession caused the Malvern Dreamer to add to his popular vision the Scriptural malediction, "Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, For I herde my sire seyne, is sevene yere ypassed, There the catte is a kitoun, the court is ful elyng" (sad). The times were bad when the traveled Mandeville returned, and he exclaimed, "In our time it may be spoken more truly than of old, that virtue is gone, the Church is under foot, the clergy is in error, the Devil reigneth, and Simony beareth sway." The same view of the state of affairs was taken by the author of "The Vision of Piers the Plowman." If the conjecture is to be believed, it was just as the candle of King Edward was burning in its socket that the gay and courtly Chaucer turned to the example of the last of the ancients, translated the "Consolations of Philosophy," and snatched from its picture of the bliss of the Former Age this wail over the misery of the present: Alas, alas, now may men wepe and crye, For in our days is nought but covetyse, Poyson, manslawtyr, murder in sondry wyse." Both in Italy and in England a period of barrenness ensued, marked in one country by the refinements of knowledge, and in the other by the quibbles and sophisms of an ignorance that aped wisdom. The French of Stratford atte Bow in Chaucer's time was neither English nor French, but twenty years later even University learning had grown so contemptible that "Oxford Latin " became a proverbial expression signifying an unmeaning jargon. The sciences were unknown, of course, though the heavens were methodically set off into twelve parts, called "houses," or "mansions," and medicine was practiced with confidence, but on superstitious and empiric principles, which had not been changed since the Emperor Nero's physician compounded the con |