ment of the other. It is significant that Langland is cited as an authority by John Ball, the leader of the great revolution of the peasantry in 1381. When this quotation was made, Piers Plowman had existed in its original recension for nineteen years, since this alludes to events of the year 1362, and to none of later date. Langland was thus about thirty when the vision befell him upon Malvern Hill: "In a summer season, when soft was the sun, I shop me into a shroud, a sheep as I were ; In habit of an hermit unholy of works, I was weary of wandringe and went me to rest And as I lay and leaned and looked on the water, I slumbered in a sleeping, it sounded so murrie." He This short extract suffices to show Langland's system of metre, which is the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse of four accents. His adoption of it at a time when it was generally yielding to rhymed metres is expressive of the sturdily English character of the man and of the poem. It is by no means unsuited to his talent, favouring the pregnant brevity in which he excels, and enabling him to depict persons and qualities by swift forcible strokes. has probably extracted as much sonority and modulation from it as it admits, and thus performed the negative service of showing its unfitness for the higher grades of poetry. The need for several accentuated words in the same line. adapted it to a monosyllabic language, and it became more difficult to handle in proportion as long words came into use. Langland's diction also is instructive, as showing the progress effected towards a recognised standard of literary speech. Though using a West Midland dialect, he is much nearer modern English than his predecessor Layamon. He is sometimes free in the employment of French and Latin words. At the beginning the poet has a vision of a castle upon a hill and a dungeon below, the intermediate space occupied by a crowd of people engaged in various occupations, generally of an unsanctified nature. Holy Church descends and informs the dreamer that the castle is Truth and the dungeon the dwelling of Falsehood. She gives him much wholesome admonition, and he mingles with the throngs of actual persons and allegorical abstractions. If Langland's terseness and pungency often remind us of Dante, his taste for allegory not unfrequently suggests the second part of Faust. "Meed," which may perhaps be defined as self-interest, Conscience, Reason, Truth, Kynde (Nature), the seven deadly sins, all play their parts. The scene changes to Westminster, and the king comes on the stage. He proposes that Meed should reform and espouse Conscience; she is willing, but Conscience refuses and Reason is called in to settle the dispute between them. Meed is condemned, but ere a decisive conclusion is reached the dreamer finds himself occupied with another vision and listening to the confessions of the Seven Deadly Sins addressed to Reason. At length Piers Plowman himself appears, not, as some have thought, the author himself, but a mystic figure, representing the ideal of conduct, and seeming gradually to assume the semblance of the Saviour. This is particularly apparent in the latter and more recent part of the poem, a series of visions intermixed with homilies, written from time to time as questions, secular or spiritual, forced themselves upon the poet. Universal love, good works, and the discouragement of earthly pride and spiritual imposture, are the burden of the whole, and the poem may be regarded as a commentary upon the aspects of the age as they presented themselves to a pious and high-minded man, a thorough Englishman in blood and intellect, and entirely unaffected by the Renaissance influences which were moulding men abroad. Piers Plowman showed that England could go high within her own limits, but also showed that much more was needed ere her literature could become important beyond them. Most of the poem was rewritten. The principal additions are the cantos entitled Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best. These are more mystical and allegorical than the commencement, and the poet's thought is often hard to follow. At the conclusion he awakes, leaving the castle of Unity erected by Piers Plowman besieged by Antichrist, and in imminent jeopardy. If this alludes to the Great Schism it is later than 1378. The alterations and additions seem to have been published about this date, and again about 1393. If, as is probable, Langland is the author of the unfinished poem which Professor Skeat has entitled Richard the Redeless (ill advised), he had returned to the West of England, for this piece appears to have been written at Bristol, which perhaps accounts for the number of nautical terms it contains. In it the poet, who had already admonished the wilful and erring Richard the Second, returns to the task, and seems to have found that it was too late, for the poem breaks off abruptly. Richard's deposition took place in September 1399, and it is not probable that Langland long survived it. We have characterised the author of Piers Plowman as a satiric poet, and such he essentially is, although he is also much more. He has decided views on political and social questions; the feudal system is his ideal; he desires no change in the institutions of his days, and thinks that all would be well if the different orders of society would but do their duty. The ecclesiastics and the peasants are the worst offenders; the former by luxury and greed, the latter by indolence. Like Dante and Bunyan, he ennobles his satire by arraying it in a garb of allegory, and his resemblance to the latter, who can hardly have read him, is sometimes startling. Langland's inferiority is chiefly in his inability to realise abstractions; he must see a thing before he paints it, and his vision is not that of the inner eye. His imagery is rustic and homely: the blood of Christ is mortar, the Church a roof, Christianity a cart. But, writing of what is familiar to him, he is intensely real. His vigour and incisiveness when he depicts what he has actually got before him may be illustrated by his delineation of GENERAL SPIRIT OF LANGLAND'S POEMS ΙΟΙ Envy, quoted with some curtailment from Miss Warren's admirable prose rendering "He was as pale as a pellet (stone bullet) and seemed in the palsy; and like a leek which has lain long in the sun, so he looked with his hollow cheeks and evil scowl. His body was well-nigh swollen to bursting for anger, so that he bit his lips and went along clenching his fist, and thought to avenge himself in deeds or in words when he saw his time." [Envy, nevertheless, is sick of himself, and would repent if he knew how. After owning that he would rather hear of the misfortune of a neighbour than be himself enriched by "a wey of cheese," he proceeds ] "When I come to the church, and should kneel to the Rood, and pray for the people as the priest teaches, then I ask on my knees that Christ would give them sorrow who bore away my bowl and tattered sheet. I turn my eye from the altar and see how Ellen has a new coat, and then I wish it were mine, and all it came from. And thus I live loveless like an evil dog, and all my body swelleth for the bitterness of my gall. I have not eaten as a man ought for many years, for envy and an evil will are hard to digest. Can no sugar nor sweet thing assuage my swelling? nor diapendion (emollient) drive it from my heart, nor neither shrift nor shame, except one scrape my maw?" "Yes," readily said Repentance, and counselled him for the best. "Sorrow for sins is the salvation of souls." This is emphatically Piers Plowman's message, and his delivery of it is perhaps the first conspicuous instance in our history of Literature taking upon herself what had hitherto been the especial office of the Church. The Creed of Piers Plowman, generally printed with The Vision, is an "Piers Plowimitation, which Professor Skeat has shown to be by the author of The man's Creed" Plowman's Tale, erroneously attributed to Chaucer. The writer is a follower of Wycliffe, and has much of his poetical model's spirit and graphic power. He represents himself as going from one order of friars to another in quest of the peace that passeth understanding, until, disgusted by their luxury and crediting all the aspersions which they cast upon each other, he at last betakes himself to the light yoke and easy burden of the Saviour. AngloNorman literature CHAPTER IV ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE, ROMANCE, BALLAD, AND HISTORY WE have in the last chapter traced the course of English literature from the period when, already from various causes in a languishing condition, it seemed all but annihilated by the catastrophe of foreign conquest, until the period of revival in the fourteenth century. At the time at which we have arrived it stands upon the verge of a renaissance as unforeseen as its fall; partly due to alliance with the other literature which had for a time threatened to overwhelm it, partly to that general awakening of the mind of Europe in which all the principal nations were beginning to participate. Two characteristics of native English literature will have been remarked, its limited range and its general seriousness. One exceptional man, Layamon, has made an attempt to transplant the epic into English, but his example has hardly found an imitator. One or two metrical histories, and a faint dawn of lyrical poetry, remain to be noticed, but these will hardly affect the general impression that the intellectual interests of the Saxon mind of the period were mainly connected with religion. Nor is this interest inspired by theological or philosophical research; it is almost entirely confined to religion in its practical aspects. It must have seemed, up to the middle of the fourteenth century, as if English literature, so far as it was Saxon, might dwindle to the level of the most diminutive European literatures of our day-Breton, Basque, Romansch—and consist mainly of catechisms and manuals of devotion. Yet, as has been shown by extracts from Richard Rolle, the language had by the fourteenth century become capable of real eloquence in prose. The limitations of its literature were mainly to be ascribed to the paralysis of the national spirit by subjugation to the foreigner, which necessarily ceased when the foreigner himself had become absorbed into the Englishman. Awakening from its slumber, English literature, like Adam, found a companion by its side. In the time of Edward the Confessor the Normans already possessed a literature derived from France, scarcely indeed extending beyond the domain of narrative poetry, yet active and progressive, while that of England lay sunk in torpor. Transplantation to England modified this literature in but one respect, the infusion of romantic feeling which it received from a closer contact with the sources of Celtic tradition, hitherto only accessible in Brittany. Otherwise |