narrative interests of the Tale are held severely in hand and the main purpose of the story was to serve as a container for numerous aphoristic and sententious quotations. From the point of view of Chaucer.as a writer of prose, the chief interest of the Tale lies in the fact that it is freely and idiomatically written, and that it thus shows how much easier Chaucer found it to translate from French than from Latin.

The other of Chaucer's two pious tales is not unlike the Tale of Melibeus. It Hikewise is obviously a translation, but the immediate source is not known.5 Whatever this immediate source may have been, it was almost certainly written in French and was closely followed by Chaucer in his translation. Like the Tale of Melibeus, the Parson's Tale is idiomatically expressed in a simple, straightforward, and unmannered style. Like the Melibeus in another respect, it is quite without personal or dramatic coloring in the body of text, although occasionally, as in the satirical passages on extravagance in dress, the conventional themes of medieval sermonizing are treated with some vivacity. But the main personal interest of the Tale lies in the fact that it is followed by the well-known retractions of Chaucer, in which he revokes his "Endytinges of worldly vanitees," and calls attention to his "othere bokes of Legendes of seintes and omelies and moralitee and devocioun."

Both the Melibeus and the Parson's Tale come safely under the head of medieval works of devotion, and it is quite probable that a good many similar pious writings of Chaucer have been lost. If so, some of them were pretty certainly written in prose, for in this kind of writing, prose had established for itself an unquestioned position.

See Hammond, Chaucer Bibliography, p. 320.

Chaucer's remaining English prose work is a kind of medieval text-book, written for his little son Louis, who was at the time of the "tendre age of ten yeer" and who had shown evidences of ability to "lerne sciencez touchinge noumbres and proporciouns." This Treatise on the Astrolabe, like Chaucer's other prose writings, is merely a translation, or adaptation, the original in this case being a Latin version of a text in Arabic. Chaucer has omitted parts of his Latin source and has re-arranged the materials to suit himself, but his translation of the Latin is often literal. Although the exigencies of the subject-matter compelled him to use a good many Latinized technical words, the style on the whole, thanks perhaps to Chaucer's efforts to adapt it to a child of ten, is simple and much more idiomatic than the style of the translation from Boethius. The work was popular in Chaucer's day, as is shown by the unusual number of twenty-two early manuscripts still extant in various libraries.

More interesting, however, to the student of Chaucer's prose than the body of this translation is an original preface by Chaucer, which is addressed to his little son Louis, and which, short as it is, constitutes the longest piece of original prose we have from Chaucer's hand. Chaucer declares it to be his purpose to set forth his treatise under "ful lighte rewles and naked wordes in English; for Latin ne canstow yit but smal, my lyte sone." He continues with a more general address to his readers in which he asks them to excuse his "rewde endyting" and his "superfluite of wordes," the first because "curious endyting and hard sentence is ful hevy atones for swich a child to lerne," and the second because it seems to him better "to wryten unto a child twyes a good sentence than he forgete it ones." In conclusion Chaucer points out that he makes no claim to 'Works, III, 175.

the original authorship of his book, but confesses that he is merely "a lewd compilatour of the labour of olde Astrologiens," whose work he has translated: "And with this swerd shal I sleen envye." The whole passage is instructive as showing that the quaint simplicity and humor which constitute the main charm of his verse writings were not impossible to Chaucer in prose. Had he chosen to do so, Chaucer might have written prose tales for some of his Canterbury pilgrims, the Shipman or the Miller for example, which would have been more than deserving of a place in that series. But prose in Chaucer's mind must have seemed entirely inappropriate for writing of an entertaining or artistic character, and he therefore uses it only for practical and pious purposes. Chaucer's attitude towards prose was generally the attitude of his contemporaries. The first English prose was written under the hard necessity of instructing and edifying men, not of pleasing them, as Chaucer was mainly endeavoring to do. The art of prose begins with the effort to adapt language to useful ends, to find some means of communication whereby men may inform or persuade each other in the thousand and one complications of everyday life. Chaucer's perfunctory use of prose shows on the one hand how little interested he was in the complexities of the life of his day from the point of view of direct exposition or of persuasion, and it shows on the other hand how little impressed he was with the possibilities of prose as an art of fine writing. Limited though this attitude towards prose may seem to the modern student, it was natural in Chaucer's day and represents undoubtedly the best literary feeling of his time. For the development of the technic of English writing in verse, Chaucer is important; for the development of the technic of English prose, he is almost negligible.

By the side of Chaucer stands his greatest literary con

temporary, Langland. Thanks to his connections with the court and with the higher official life of his time, public records have preserved a considerable body of information with respect to Chaucer. All that is known of Langland, on the other hand, is derived from the various manuscripts of his writings, and the information thus obtained is meager and often uncertain. It is fairly sure that the author of Piers Plowman was of Midland origin, that he lived for some time in London, that he was married and therefore not eligible to any of the higher offices of the church, that he himself had known the miseries of poverty which he so feelingly describes, and that his Christian name was William. The exact form of his surname is doubtful, but tradition has firmly established Langland in general use. The poem which passes under Langland's name is not a single, systematically organized work, but rather a group of closely related poems centering more or less about the figure of the Plowman. It is recorded in three quite distinct versions, the earliest composed about 1362, the second a revision and enlargement of this version made some fifteen years later, and the third a second revision probably made in the last decade of the fourteenth century. Certain interesting questions of technical scholarship have been raised by the existence of these three versions, the most important being whether the three versions are to be regarded as the work of a single poet or of two or more poets who revised and expanded the original theme as it was first developed by Langland. It is quite certain that Piers Plowman came to be in time a type figure about whom there gathered a considerable number of writings of generally similar style and purpose. He became thus in a way the eponymous hero of popular political and theological discussion of the times.8 But that the three versions of the poem known as Piers See below, p. 60.

Plowman were the work of a school of popular alliterative poets, writing perhaps under the direct inspiration of Langland very much as Wiclif's poor priests preached and taught under the leadership of their master, though not inherently impossible, seems on the ground of the evidence less probable than that Langland himself revised and enlarged his own work. Whether the poem be regarded as the work of one or of several authors, however, the significant point is that the three versions exemplify a homogeneous and fully thought out method of literary expression.

Both the similarities and the differences of Piers Plowman as compared with the writings of Chaucer are significant. Like Chaucer, Langland accepted verse unquestioningly as the proper medium of literary expression and for general, popular appeal. He viewed life at a different angle from the courtly Chaucer, but he also in his degree was a literary artist, and in his art, the child of his own generation. Both poets used the standard literary speech of their day, for Chaucer's style was not pedantically learned, nor was Langland's extravagantly archaic or popular. The most striking characteristic of Langland which distinguishes him from Chaucer, the characteristic also which connects him directly with the study of the origins of English prose, is his use of metrical form. Chaucer wrote in the strictly regulated meter of numbered syllables and of rime which English borrowed from French and which the traditions of English poetry have established as the prevailing English meter. But Langland followed a different and native style of metrical composition, moribund but temporarily revived in his day and effectively employed by a number of different poets. This was the alliterative long line which came by direct descent from the Old English line of Cædmon and Cynewulf. It differs from the Old