"PIERS PLOWMAN"

97 sides with the Commons in their disputes with the Crown. He is always patriotic, and, as M. Jusserand says, insular; he would maintain the old distinctions of classes and fix wages by the authority of the State; he detests Lombards as Queen Anne's country gentlemen detested the moneyed interest. Stringent and fiery in reproof as he is, he is yet tender to penitent transgressors. His liberality of nature is shown by his kindly mention of the Jew. Honest, healthy, homely, he is an Englishman of the best type, a precursor and practically an ally of Wycliffe, dealing with the ethical side of current beliefs and customs as Wycliffe dealt with the theological. His Protestantism is undeveloped, he preserves considerable

respect for the Chair of Peter, but his tendencies are entirely anti-sacerdotal. He bitterly denounces the worldliness of the Papacy, the greed of the legates the luxury of the clergy, and the traffic in relics and indulgences, and plainly foretells the downfall of the religious houses:

"And now [he says] is religion a rider, a roamer by streets,

A leader of lovedayes and a land-buyer,

A priker on a palfrey from manor to manor,

A hep of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were,

And but his knave knele, that shall his cuppe bring,

He lowreth on hym, and asketh hym who taught hym curtesie."

Langland represents the dissatisfaction of the lower and the more thinking classes of English society as Chaucer represents the content of the aristocracy and the prosperous middle class. Each is in a manner the comple

VOL. I.

G

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