master, who, when he caught up the company, found his man owning that they lived by borrowing gold of men who think that of a pound they can make two:

"Yet it is false; and ay we have good hope

It is for to doon, and after it we grope."

The canon cried at his man for a slanderer. The host bade the man tell on, and not mind his master, who then turned and fled for shame, leaving the company to be entertained with "The Canon's Yeoman's Tale," preluded with experience of alchemy.

The manciple related after this the tale, from Ovid's "Metamorphoses," of the turning of the crow from white to black for having told Apollo of the falsehood of his Coronis. There is then an indication of the time of day-four o'clock in the afternoon - before "The Parson's Tale," which evidently was meant to stand last; for it is a long and earnest sermon in prose on a text applying the parable of a pilgrimage to man's heavenward journey. The text is from Jeremiah, vi. 16, "Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”

23. Much debate is now going on among scholars respecting the genuineness of some of the writings attributed to Chaucer. By F. J. Furnivall, for example, the genuineness of the following works is vehemently denied, "The Court of Love; "The Craft of Lovers, and Remedy of Love; ""The Lamentation of Mary Magdalene;" "The Romaunt of the Rose;" "The Complaint of the Black Knight; "Chaucer's Dream; "The Flower and the Leaf;" and "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." The argument against them is, that, in the earliest extant MSS., Chaucer is not named as their author; that they contain many violations of Chaucer's usages in rhyme; that some of them are ridiculously inferior to his certified works; and, finally, that some of them are obviously of a date later than his life. The trial of the case, however, is still in progress, and the final verdict cannot yet be rendered.

CHAPTER II.

SECOND HALF OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. CHAUCER'S LITERARY CONTEMPORARIES.

1. John Gower; his Balades; "Speculum Meditantis;" "Vox Clamantis;" "Confessio Amantis;" his Later Years; "Tripartite Chronicle."-2. William Langland; "The Vision of Piers Ploughman;" Imitations of it.-3. John Barbour; "Bruce.”—4. Sir John Mandeville; "Travels."-5. John Wiclif.— 6. John Trevisa; "Translation of Higden's Polychronicon.” — 7. Ralph Strode.

1. THOUGH Chaucer had no peer in genius during his own time, there were among his contemporaries several strong men of letters, of whom three were poets, John Gower, William Langland, and John Barbour; and three were prose-writers, Sir John Mandeville, John Wiclif, and John Trevisa.

John Gower was a gentleman of Kent, close kindred to a wealthy knight, Sir Robert Gower. The date of his birth is not known; but he survived Chaucer eight years, dying, a blind old man, in the year 1408. It is likely that he was born two or three years before Chaucer. He was well educated; wrote with ease in French, Latin, and English; and used coat armor at a time when such matters had significance. We know that he had landed property in several counties, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Kent. Among the pleasant hills of Otford in Kent, Gower was at home in the reign of Edward III. as a country gentleman who had neither wish nor need to live at court. He wrote, in these his earlier days, verse, not merely according to the fashion of France, but in French. There remains a collection of his French exercises in love-poetry, "Balades," a form of Provençal verse not in the least related to the Northern ballad. A balade is a love-poem in three stanzas of seven or eight (usually seven) lines, and a final quatrain. Gower wrote five of his balades for those who "look for

the issue of their love in honest marriage." The other forty. five are of the usual kind, mere variations on the given theme, "universal to all the world, according to the properties and conditions of lovers who are diversely experienced in the fortune of love."

Gower wrote also three long poems, one in French, one in Latin, one in English. The one in French is lost. It was divided into twelve books, treating of the vices and virtues, and of the various degrees of men seeking as a contemporary described it to teach by a right path the way whereby a transgressed sinner ought to return to the knowledge of his Creator. That first work, called the "Speculum Meditantis' ("Mirror of one Meditating"), was written, no doubt, in the reign of Edward III., and was probably the book which earned for the poet, from his friend Chaucer, the name of "Moral Gower."

In the earlier days of Richard II., John Gower was still living at his home in Kent; and in May, 1381, he was in the very midst of the tumult connected with the uprising of the men of Kent and the men of Essex, led on by Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and John Ball. This event drew from John Gower his second great poem, the "Vox Clamantis" ("Voice of One Crying"), in seven books of Latin elegiacs.

In its first book Gower told of the revolt allegorically, in the form of a dream of beasts who have changed their nature. A voice admonished him quickly to write what he had seen and heard; for dreams often contain warnings of the future.

In his second book, being awake, he did begin to write, invoking no muse but the Holy Spirit. If he seem unpolished to the reader, let the reader spare the faults, and look to the inner meaning of his work. And again and again he asks that the soul of his book, not its mere form, be looked to. "The Voice of One Crying" shall be the name of his volume, because there are written in it the words that come of a fresh grief. Then he went on to utter what was in his heart. There is no blind fortune ruling the affairs of men; they go ill or well according to the manner in which men fulfil their duties before God. As we do, so we rejoice or suffer. There is no misfortune, no good luck. Whatever happens among us, for good or ill, comes with our own doing, "nos sumus in causa." The object of Gower's "Vox Clamantis" was, therefore, to set the educated men, readers of Latin, to the task of find

ing that disease within our social body of which the Jack Straw rebellion was but a symptom; his plan was to go through all orders of society, and ask himself wherein each fell short of its duty.

This he began to do in the third book, which has, like the second, a most earnest prelude. "I do not," Gower says, "affect to touch the stars, or write the wonders of the poles; but rather, with the common human voice that is lamenting in this land, I write the ills I see. In the voice of my crying there will be nothing doubtful; for every man's knowledge will be its best interpreter." Then follows a passage which ought to be quoted by all teachers who would train young people to write. Gower prays that his verse may not be turgid; that there may be in it no word of untruth; that each word may answer to the thing it speaks of pleasantly and fitly; that he may flatter in it no one, and seek in it no praise above the praise of God. "Give me that there shall be less vice, and more virtue, for my speaking."

Then he divided society into three classes, represented by clerk, soldier, and ploughman; and to an unsparing review of their vices he devotes the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth books. The seventh and last book applied Nebuchadnezzar's dream to the state of society in England; man's hard avarice being the iron in the feet of the image, and his lusts the clay. Prelates, curates, priests, scholars, monks, friars, soldiers, merchants, lawyers, were degenerate. Gower declared, with this, his especial love for the land of his birth. He repeated that what he had written was not his own complaint, but the voice of the people revealed to him in his dream. It touches only the guilty; and may each correct his own fault where he finds it! "Here," he says, "is the voice of the people; but often where the people cries is God." And in the "Vox Clamantis" we do hear the voice that throughout the literature of the English people labors to maintain the right and to undo the wrong.

Between Gower and Chaucer there seems always to have been a devoted friendship. When, in the first year of Richard's reign, Chaucer went with a mission to Lombardy, he had left the care of his private interests in the hands of two friends, one of whom was John Gower. Chaucer had dedicated to Gower his "Troilus and Cressida," and had then joined to his friend's name a word of honor, as the "moral Gower," which cleaves to it still. Presently we come to a poem of Gower's from which we learn that this friendship remained unbroken to their later days.

In 1389 King Richard had taken the government into his own hands, and, living in fear of his people, made some effort to rule also himself. For a few following years, men who, like

Gower, had their country's welfare at heart, credited the king with good intentions, and gave him loyally their friendship. In 1393, John Gower, rowing to town from his house in Kent or Essex by the river highway, then commonly used as the great London road, met the king's barge. At the invitation of Richard - who was at that time twenty-six years old, while the poet's age was about sixty-six — Gower left his boat, and conversed with the king, who, in the course of conversation, asked him to write a new book for himself to read. Gower had been suffering from a long illness, and still was ill: but he undertook to write such a book in English for King Richard, to whom his allegiance and heart's obedience were due; and he resolved to write so that his words might be as wisdom to the wise, and recreation to the idle. Thus Gower began his "Confessio Amantis ("Confession of a Lover") at a time when his friend Chaucer was at work upon "The Canterbury Tales;" and thus each poet in his latter years was following the example which had been set by Boccaccio in his "Decameron," except that they used verse instead of prose in stringing a chain of tales on a slight thread of story. But, as to the spirit of their work, the English poets differ much from the Italian.

In the "Confessio Amantis," Gower's notion of a poem that should be

"Wisdom to the wise,

And play to them that list to play,"

was as serious as Hampole's "Pricke of Conscience." He began by telling its origin, and dedicating it to the king. But in a revision of his book, made when Richard had cast down the hope of those who credited him, for a few years after 1389, with the desire to do his duty, Gower expunged his words of allegiance; said, in place of them, "What shall befall here afterward God wot!" and transferred the dedication to Henry of Lancaster. For the fashionable device of his poem, Gower, infirm and elderly, cared little. To the best of his power he used it as a sort of earthwork, from behind which he set himself the task of digging and springing a mine under each of the seven deadly sins. There were eight books, with a prologue. The prologue repeated briefly the cry of the "Vox Clamantis." The eight books were, one for each of the seven deadly sins, with one interpolated book, seventh in the series, which rhymed into English a digest of the "Secretum Secretorum." This was summary of philosophical and political doctrine wrongly supposed in