alone. So they slew him, and had short mirth afterwards over the wine he had poisoned.

"The Shipman's Tale," from the "Decameron," was of a knavish young monk. The prioress told the legend of a Christian child killed by the Jews in Asia. The child when living loved the Virgin, who appeared to it when dying and put a grain under its tongue, so that the dead child-martyr still sang, "O alma Redemptoris Mater." Until the grain was removed, the song continued. Chaucer himself began "The Rhyme of Sir Thopas," a merry burlesque upon the metrical romances of the day, ridiculing the profusion of trivial detail that impeded the progress of a story of tasteless adventures. Sir Thopas rode into a forest, where he lay down, and, as he had dreamed all night that he should have an elfqueen for his love, got on his horse again to go in search of the elfqueen; met a giant, whom he promised to kill next day, the giant throwing stones at him; and came again to town to dress himself for the adventure. The pertinacity with which the rhyme proceeds to spin and hammer out all articles of clothing and armor worn by Sir Thopas makes the host exclaim at the story-teller, "Mine earës aken for thy drasty speech," and cry, "No more!" The device, too, is ingenious, which puts the poet out of court in his own company, so far as regards the question who won the supper. His verse having been cried out upon, Chaucer answers the demand upon him for a tale in prose with The Tale of Melibus," a moral allegory upon the duties of life. "The Monk's Tale" is of men in high estate who have fallen into hopeless adversity, - a series of short "tragedies," suggested by a popular Latin prose-book of Boccaccio's on the "Falls of Illustrious Men." Among the monk's examples is that of Ugolino, whereof Chaucer writes that they who would hear it at length should go to Dante, "the gretë poete of Itaille," as he had said of any reader curious to hear more of Zenobia, “Let him unto my maister Petrarch go." The host at last stopped Piers the monk because his tales were dismal; and Sir John, the nun's priest, asked for something merry, told a tale of the Cock and the Fox, taken from the fifth chapter of the "Roman de Renart."

Thus the pilgrims made for themselves entertainment by the way till they reached Boughton-under-Blean, seven miles from Canterbury, where they were overtaken by a canon's yeoman, who was followed by his master. These had ridden after the pilgrims for three miles. They seem to have followed them from Faversham, where the canon, a ragged, joyless alchemist, who lived in a thieves' lane of the suburb, was on the watch for travellers whom he might join, and dupe with his pretensions to a power of transmuting metals. This canon, said his man, after other flourishing as herald of his master, could pave all their road to Canterbury with silver and gold. "I wonder, then," said Harry Bailly, "that your lord is so sluttish, if he can buy better clothes. His overslop is not worth a mite; it is all dirty and torn." Chaucer proceeds then skilfully to represent the gradual but quick slide of the yeoman's faith from his

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 Wielif. — 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 fortyfive 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, 66 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. IIe 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