XXV. St. Amour reinstated. No sooner however had pope Alexander CHAP. IV, the great adversary of William de St, Amour, expired, than the latter returned to Paris, and was reinstated in his former dignities. The university was now less strenu ous and peremptory in her opposition to the mendicant orders, but she received St. Amour with open arms, as the most generous of her champions, and the martyr of her cause. On his part, he shewed himself by no means subdued by the adversity he had sustained, and persisted as long as he lived in the most galling and unintermitted attacks upon the mendicants, the authors of his disgraced. Gerson, the most active and eloquent leader in the council of Constance in 1414, has expressed himself with the greatest ab, horrence against John de Meun for his share in the composition of the Roman de la Rose, alleging that," if he thought the author did Gerson's censure of the Ro man de la Rose. Mosheim, f. 28. XXV. CHAP not repent himself of that book before he died, he would no more vouchsafe to pray for his soul, than he would for that of Judas who betrayed Christ." This antipathy of the orthodox divine has sometimes been ascribed to the licentious sentiments occasionally interspersed in the work. But it is probable that it rather arose from the free insinuations of the poet respecting religious hypocrisy, and his attacks upon those orders of men, which Gerson well knew had essentially contributed to the prosperity of the Catholic Church. These particulars relative to the history of the mendicant friars, obscure and personal as on a superficial view they may appear, tend eminently to illustrate the state of the church, and the temper and feelings which at this time prevailed respecting the practices of the Roman Catholic religion; and will probably be found, not only to fur XXV. nish the best commentary upon one of Chau- CHAP. cer's most voluminous productions, but also the fittest introduction to the history of those measures of ecclesiastical polity in which Chaucer himself was afterward concerned. СНАР. THE discourse, which, as has already been XXVI. mentioned, was imitated by Regnier, the sa Satire upon troduced into this poem. women in. tirist of the reign of Henry IV. of France, is considerably longer than that of False-semblant upon religious imposture. It is supposed to be addressed, by an old woman whom Jealousy had appointed porter to one of the gates of her fortification, to Bel-accueil, or Kind-Welcoming, a personage whom, as being one of the abettors of the lover in his adventure, Jealousy had seized and shut up in a strong tower. The Old-Woman is prevailed upon by a detachment of the baronage of Love, consisting of Largesse and Courtesy, XXVI. to release the prisoner and previously to her CHAP. dismissing him from dance, she addresses to him the discourse in question. It is sufficiently remarkable that, though the instructions of the Old-Woman are addressed to a stripling, they are so constructed as to have relation almost exclusively to the use of her own sex: a sufficient proof either that this discourse is a translation only of some satire which was already in the possession of popular favour, or that the poet had written it for a different occasion, and found it convenient to insert it in the present work. The discourse of the Old-Woman may be considered as almost a complete code of female libertinism: and it is not a little ex-traordinary, that the very age in which the system of modern gallantry was perfected, and in which men learned to regard the gentler sex with a distance and awe, that borrowed its language from the phrases of divine worship, should be distinguished for depravity and licentiousness of manners. The tales which Boccaccio, La Fontaine, Voltaire, and others, have consecrated and immortal |