army of supporters, and they find the ale-house convenient as a banqueting place.

The tendency of men and women to consort in separate herds was, unquestionably, encouraged by the mediæval Church, whether designedly or not; and the tendency exists now in Roman Catholic countries. As near home as Ireland we may see it. Roman Catholic dignitaries, who have interested themselves in the question of intemperance among the poor, will tell you that Irishmen get together and drink at the ale-house or whisky-shop, but that domestic conviviality is a much rarer thing. I cannot, of course, here pursue the subject, or attempt to adjust the proportions of cause and effect in these concomitant things; but the mind at once fixes upon the spirit of caste which belongs to Roman Catholic organization, the doctrine of the inferiority of woman and of the married to the virgin' life, and upon the influence of the priestneither man nor woman himself, but an isolator by necessity of function-as striking ingredients in this matter. No moral culture can be perfect which does not place and keep the man and woman side by side on terms of equality (equality ad hoc, to say the least). By the accident that she was the guardian of learning, and that the learning of the time was more uniform than ours, the medieval Church may be said to have indirectly helped to keep the culture of cultivated women at a very great height as compared with

that of the conventional modern standard.* But now that a wide culture for women includes science, because science is thrusting its way into all education whatever, the Roman Catholic Church looks with no favourable eye upon the idea of an enlarged intellectual curriculum for women. In all that relates to women, the power of the medieval Church began to break in the time of Chaucer's great contemporary Wycliffe ; there are signs in our own day that the power of the Roman Catholic Church is increasing in the same direction. One comfort we have, that that Church can no longer be supposed to keep the keys of culture.

* Heloise, for example, was a very learned woman, in some important respects (I believe, in knowledge of Greek) the superior of Abelard.

CHAPTER VI.

MERRY ENGLAND.

SOME of the students of Chaucer appear to have been so puzzled by his use of the word merry in the Nun Priest's Tale, where he says that the voice of the widow's Cock was like the mery orgon,' as actually to go about to modify the meaning of the word merry, as used in the fourteenth century, But, in the first place, Chaucer says in his Goodly Ballade :'

'God wote on musike I can not, but I gesse,

Alas why so, that I might saie or syng.'

so that he probably did not know much about the orgon; and in the second place, he would naturally apply the word 'merry' to the organ, because it was an instrument employed in the praise of God. "Is any merry? let him sing psalms.' And, by the bye, after Chaucer's own frank confession that he was not musical, we need not trouble ourselves much about his description of the musical accomplishments of Nicholas in the Miller's Tale. We are informed that he sang the Kynges note,' but nobody seems to know what the Kynges note' was. What if Chaucer, accurate in detail as he usually is, did not himself know? Perhaps it was one of the ballads of King Edward's wars. At all events, the word 'merry' has been used from time immemorial with the same flexibility of application as the words good, fair, free, and the like. Nicholas had a mery throte,' and Absolon was a mery child.' It is true he sang and strummed as much as Nicholas, but the poet's proximate reason for calling him a 'mery child' is that

He had a gay surplys,

As whyt as is the blosme upon the rys.'

A gay white surplice!

All words of this order were

used by our forefathers with a freedom, the loss of which, where we have lost it, is matter of regret. It is not pleasant, for example, to find a modern hymnist stumbling at the word 'gallant,' applied by an older writer to the bowers of the Jerusalem the Golden, and substituting another adjective, because he was really

afraid of that fine old word. Meanwhile we may amuse ourselves with the question-Is it true that England is now less of a merry England than it once was?

We look back through the mist of centuries as well as we can, and, taking Jack-in-the-green on the way, permit our eyes to rest upon a heterogeneous picture of gabled houses, splendid shows, glancing colours, and rapid movement, with plenty of music. The Midsummer watch is set, and the watchmen, with their cressets, walk the streets. Or the garland is stretched overhead, and the girls are dancing. Or the butts are fixed, and the lads are out in the meadow with their bows and arrows. Or the fool, in motley, shakes his bells and plays his pranks in some gay procession. Or the young cockneys are up and abroad early in the first of May, to fetch in the sweetsmelling boughs. And somewhere in the air is the sound of the timbrel, shaken, as we guess, by a healthy maiden, and the ringing of bells, and even the horn of the huntsman, for, perhaps, the chase is up in Epping Forest. Was there then more 'gaieté de cœur' in this England, or in a still younger England, than in the England that we all know to-day?

II. It will not seem paradoxical to thoughtful readers to remark that though the growth of personal freedom promotes happiness, it need not promote obtrusive, visible gaiety, or merriment in a people. Nor does it.