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If this king come in

mankind will be fetch,

And lead it where Lazar is and lightly me bind
Patriarchs and prophets have parled' hereof long

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and reach me the bars

That such a lord and a light shall lead them all hence.
But rise up, Ragamuffin !
That Belial thy bel-sire2

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beat, with thy dam1.

and His light stop.

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Ere we through brightness be blent bar we the gates!
Check we, and chain we · and each chine' stop,

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That no light leap in at louvre nor at loop.

And thou, Ashtaroth, hoot out and have out our knaves,
Colting, and all his kin our cattle to save.

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Brimstone boiling burning out-cast it

All hot on their heads that enter nigh the walls.

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Set bows of brake and brazen guns,

12

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is

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a-cloy 13 we them each one!' this lord know,

long ago I knew him.
nor devil's queintise 15;

And shoot out shot enough · His sheltrums to blend.
Set Mahound at the mangonel
With crooks and with calthrops
'Listen!' quoth Lucifer 'for
Both this lord and this light
May no death this Lord dere 14
And, where He will, is His way
If He reave me of my right
For, by right and by reason
Body and soul be mine · both good and ill.
For He Himself it said

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Should die with dool1s and here dwell ever,

If that they touched a tree or took thereof an apple.

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Thus this lord of light such a law made;

And, since He is so leal a Lord I 'lieve that He will not
Reave us of our right since reason them damnèd.
And, since we have been seised

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And [He] never was there-against and now will begin,

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He were unwrast of1 His word that witness is of truth!' 'That is sooth,' said Satan'but I me sore doubt,

For thou got them with guile

Against His love and His leave

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and His garden broke,

on His land yedest3,

Not in form of a fiend but in form of an adder;

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And enticedest Eve to eat by herself,

And behightest her and him after to know,

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As two gods, with God both good and ill;

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through false

Thus haddest thou them out and hither at the last.

It is not graithly9 gotten where guile is at the root.

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Forthy I dread me,' quoth the devil'lest Truth will them

fetch;

And, as thou beguiledest God's image · in going of an adder, So hath God beguiled us all in going of a wy11'

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'What lord art Thou?' quoth Lucifer a voice aloud said,
'The lord of might and of main that made all things.
Duke of this dim place anon undo the gates,
That Christ may come in
And with that breath hell
For any wy or ward 12
Patriarchs and prophets
Sang with saint John
Lucifer might not look

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the king's son of heaven.'
brake with all Belial's bars;
wide opened the gates.
populus in tenebris

ecce agnus Dei!

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And those that our Lord loved with that light forth flew.

Ashtoreth and all others hid them in hernes 14,

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They durst not look on our Lord the least of them all,
But let Him lead forth which Him list

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Many hundreds of angels harped then and sang,

Culpat caro, purgat caro, Regnat Deus Dei care Then piped Peace of poetry a note,

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Clarior est solito post maxima nebula Phebus,

Post inimicitias clarior est et amor.

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'After sharpest showers,' quoth Peace 'most sheen is the sun Is no weather warmer than after watery clouds,

Nor love liefer nor liefer friends,

Than after war and wrack

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when Love and Peace be masters.

Was never war in this world nor wickeder envy,
But Love, if him list to laughing it brought,

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And Peace, through patience all perils stopped.'

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Truth trumped them, and sang Te Deum laudamus;
And then luted Love in a loud note,

Ecce quam bonum et quam iocundum est habitare fratres
in unum!

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Till the day dawned these damsels danced,

That men rung to the resurrection and with that I awaked, And called Kitte my wife and Calote my daughter,

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and kiss it for a jewel,

And creep on knees to the cross

And rightfullest relic none richer on earth!

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For God's blessed body it bare, for our boot',

And it a-feareth 2 the fiend;
May no grisly ghost

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for such is the might,

glide where it shadoweth !'

'belp, remedy.

frightens away.

GOWER.

The

[JOHN GOWER seems to have been born about 1330, and died in 1408, having been blind for eight or nine years before his death. He was a gentleman of ancient family, owning estates in Kent and Suffolk. place of his birth is unknown; he is believed to have died in the priory of St. Mary Overies, Southwark, in the church of which, now called St. Saviour's. his tomb may still be seen. The earliest of his three principal works, Speculum Meditantis, was in French verse, but it has not come down to posterity, nor is the precise time of its composition known. The second, Vox Clamantis, in Latin elegiac verse, was written Letween 1382 and 1384, and commemorates the rising of the commons under Wat Tyler in the former year, moralizing upon it and improving the occasion with astonishing prolixity. The third, Confessio Amantis, one of the best known of early English poems, was written between 1385 and 1393.]

It was

The poetry of Gower has been variously estimated. a practice with the poets of the sixteenth century to link his name in a venerated trio with those of Chaucer and Lydgate, just as in the seventeenth century the names of Shakspere, Jonson, and Fletcher were often joined together as the great dramatic lights of the preceding age. In each case the effect of closer study has been to lead men to think that they have been joining gold with iron and clay. Shakspere, read attentively, rises high above the standard reached by Jonson and Fletcher; and in a yet greater degree has the genius of Chaucer, accurately studied and rightly felt, impressed the present age with the sense of his unrivalled eminence among his contemporaries.

Gower, a man of birth and fortune, must have lived in the cultivated society of his day. Of that society, French poetry, in its various forms of Fabliau, Rondel, Romance, Epigram, Chanson, &c., was one of the chief delights and distractions. With much imitative power, with the faculty of sustained attention, with a high appreciation for his own thoughts, and remarkable

linguistic facility, Gower, when he betook himself to poetry, was sure to become a copious and prolific writer. But, possessing na originality, he was equally sure to remain pent within the imprisoning bounds of fashion and conventionality, to follow, not take the lead, to interpret, not modify opinion. He seems to have been without the sense of humour; we doubt if a single jest of his own making can be found throughout his writings. From this cause, although he may justly be called a moralist and a didactic writer, (Chaucer and Lydgate both speak of him as the 'moral' Gower), the higher intellectual rank of a satirist must be denied him. The moralist declaims, the satirist paints; we are convinced of the deformity of vice in the one case, but we see it in the other. The faculties of the first dispose him to subjective estimates of men and things, those of the second to objective estimates. The one describes the offenders, the other makes them exhibit themselves. The moralist inveighs against the selfish cowardice of a degraded proletariat; the satirist puts a few simple words in their mouths, and we know them and their kind for evermore.

'Curramus praecipites, et

Dum jacet in ripa, calcemus Caesaris hostem.'

Several MSS. of the Confessio Amantis, Gower's principal poem, contain a passage in Latin prose in which he describes the three books which he had written, all with a didactic motive, 'doctrinae causa.' The first of these, Speculum Meditantis, was in French verse. It was probably written between 1360 and 1370, at a period when the ladies at Edward III's court and their admirers would hardly have condescended to read a poem couched in their native English, a tongue not then believed to be suited to themes of love, mysticism, and chivalry. It was a strictly moral poem, treating of virtues and vices, and the methods of penitence and amendment; but it has absolutely vanished; and since from the account we have of the contents it is impossible not to believe that it was exceedingly dull, we may be reconciled to the loss. Gower's next considerable effort, the Vox Clamantis, a Latin elegiac poem in seven books, was suggested by the rising of the commons under Wat Tyler and others in 1381. Why he chose to write it in Latin it is impossible to say, unless we suppose that he wished to hide from the objects of them, under the veil of a learned language, the sharp censures on the classes of knights, burghers, and cultivators, which the poem contains. In a passage

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