his time. To be his chaplain, and by scholarship to win the household affection of a man so influential with the king, was a step to promotion sure enough to satisfy ambitious minds; while life with Richard Aungervyle housed the scholar among books, and gave him hourly access to the best library in England.

He died at his palace of Auckland in 1345; and it was only a little while before his death that he had finished his delightful book about books, which will keep his name alive as long as books last. It consists of a prologue and twenty chapters. In the prologue he greets his readers, and expresses sympathy for good scholars whose study poverty impedes; and for their sakes, as well as his own, he has long been, he says, an ardent collector of books. The first chapter opens the subject by commanding wisdom, and books as the abode of wisdom. "The glory of the world would perish in oblivion if God had not provided mortals with the remedies of books. Towers crumble to the earth; but he whose book lives cannot die. And it is to be considered, lastly, what convenience of teaching is in books, how easily, how secretly, how safely, in books we bear, without shame, the poverty of human ignorance. These are masters who instruct us without rod and cane, without words and wrath, and for no clothes or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you question them, they are not secret; if you go astray, they do not grumble at you; they know not how to laugh if you are ignorant. O books! ye only are liberal and free, who pay tribute to all who ask it, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully."

Thus he proceeds from chapter to chapter, writing in a vivacious style, and enforcing, with a contagious enthusiasm, the right spirit of study and the right care of books. It is noticeable, that, orthodox bishop as he was, no book of the time spoke more severely than his of the degradation of the clergy, of the sensuality and ignorance of monks and friars. The main object of Richard de Bury's book was practical. He was within a year of his death when he wrote it; and he desired not only to justify his life-long enthusiasm as a book-collector, but to make the treasures which he had held in his lifetime as a trust for the

benefit of all good scholarship in England useful after his death forever. "Philobiblon" ended, therefore, with a plan for the bequest of his books to Oxford, on conditions that were to secure their perpetual usefulness, not merely to the particular hall which he proposed to endow in association with his library, but to the whole university. He did, accordingly, endow a hall, which the monks of Durham had begun to build in the north suburbs of Oxford, and did leave to it his famous library. Aungervyle's library remained at Durham College, for the use of the university, until that college was dissolved in the time of Henry VIII. Some of the books then went to Duke Humphrey's library, and some to Balliol College. Some went to Dr. George Owen, the physician of Edward VI.

CHAPTER II.

ENGLISH WRITINGS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD.

1. State of English Literature in this Period.-2. Layamon.-3. Orm.-4. Nich olas of Guildford; Devotional and Moral Writings; Romances; Ancren Riwle. 5. Robert of Gloucester and his Contemporaries.-6. Robert of Brunne. 7. Laurence Minot. S. Richard Rolle.-9. Dan Michel. - 10. Ralph Higden and English Miracle-Plays.-11. The Chester Plays.-12. The Shepherds' Play.-13. The Modern Drama.

1. We must now turn from the Latin and French writings produced by Englishmen during the three centuries between the Conquest and Chaucer, and must give our attention to whatever writings were produced during the same period in the English language.

For the first hundred and forty years of this period almost nothing was written in the language of the conquered race; and we may think of English literature for all those hundred and forty years as in a state of abeyance, waiting for the time when the people who were inclined to write in the English language should rally from the depression caused by the Norman Conquest. In the reign of King John, which began in 1199, books in the English language once more made their appearance; and their number steadily increased from that time onward. Nevertheless, during this entire period, English was not the fashionable or dominant language in England; and the highest and best thought of England uttered itself in speech that was alien to England.

2. Perhaps the earliest book representing the revival of a desire for literary utterance in English is a long and notable poem called "Brut." Its author was Layamon, a priest of the church at Ernley, in Worcestershire. Living in the days when Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Chronicle" and Wace's French

metrical version of it were new books in high fame among the educated and the courtly, "it came to him in mind, and in his chief thought," that he would tell the famous story to his countrymen in English verse. He made a long journey in search of copies of the books on which he was to found his poem; and when he had come home again, as he says, "Layamon laid down those books, and turned the leaves; he beheld them lovingly. May the Lord be merciful to him!" Then, blending literature with his parish duties, the good priest began his work. Priest in a rural district, he was among those who spoke the language of the country with the least mixture of Norman French, and he developed Wace's "Brut" into a completely English poem, with so many additions from his own fancy, or his own knowledge of West-country tradition, that, while Wace's "Brut" is a poem of 15,300 lines, Layamon's "Brut" is a poem of 32,250 lines. Layamon's verse is the old First English unrhymed measure, with alliteration, less regular in its structure than in First English times, and with an occasional slip into rhyme. Battles are described as in First English poems. Here, as in First English poetry, there are few similes, and those which occur are simply derived from natural objects. There is the same use of a descriptive synonyme for man or warrior. There is the old depth of earnestness that rather gains than loses dignity by the simplicity of its expression. From internal evidence it appears that the poem was completed about the year 1205. It comes down to us in two thirteenth-century MSS., one written a generation later than the other, and there are many variations of their text; but the English is so distinctly that of the people in a rural district, that, in the earlier MS., the whole poem contains less than fifty words derived from the Norman, and some of these might have come direct from Latin. In the second MS. about twenty of those words do not occur; but forty others are used. Thus the two MSS., in their 56,800 lines, do not contain more than ninety words of Norman origin. In its grammatical structure Layamon's English begins for us the illustration of the gradual loss of inflections, and other changes, during the transition of the language from First English to its present form. It has been called Semi-Saxon; it is

better called Transitional English of Worcestershire in the beginning of the thirteenth century.

3. A writer named Ormin, or Orm, began also, in the reign of King John, another English poem of considerable extent, called, from his own name, "The Ormulum." He tells of himself, in the dedication of his book, that he was a regular canon of the order of St. Augustine, and that he wrote in English, at the request of brother Walter (also an Augustinian canon), for the spiritual improvement of his countrymen. The plan of his book is to give to the English people, in their own tongue, and in an attractive form, the spiritual import of the church services throughout the year. He gave first a metrical paraphrase of the portion of the Gospel assigned to each day, and added to each portion of it a metrical homily, in which it was expounded doctrinally and practically, with frequent borrowing from the writings of Elfric, and some borrowing from Bede. The metre is in alternate verses of eight and seven syllables, in imitation of a Latin rhythm; or in lines of fifteen syllables, with a metrical point at the end of the eighth; thus,

"Thiss boce iss nemmnedd Orrmulum,

Forrthi thatt Orrm itt wrohhte."

Of the homilies provided for nearly the whole of the yearly service nothing remains beyond the thirty-second, and there remains no allusion that points to the time when the work was written. Its language, however, places it with the earliest examples of Transitional English, and it belongs, no doubt, to the reign of John, or to the first years of the reign of Henry III. It seems to be the Transitional English of a north-eastern county; and the author had a peculiar device of spelling, on the adherence to which by copyists he laid great stress. Its purpose evidently was to guide any half-Normanized town-priest in the right pronunciation of the English when he read these verses aloud for the pleasure and good of the people. After every

short vowel, and only then, Orm doubled the consonant.

4. In the reign of Henry III. (1216–1272), which we have now reached, the production of books in the English language became more and more

common.