It

of poetic feeling in his verse; and scarcely ever does it rise to anything approaching stateliness; but it keeps a good dog-trot jog, as of one who knew what he was doing, and meant to do it. What he meant was-to whip the vices of the priests and to scourge the covetousness of the rich and of the men in power. is English all over; English in the homeliness of its language; he makes even Norman words sound homely; English in spirit too; full of good, hearty, grumbling humora sort of predated and poetic kind of Protestantism. Plums might be picked out of it for the decoration of a good radical or agrarian speech of to-day.

MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1889, English Lands Letters and Kings, From Celt to Tudor, pp. 84, 85.

No doubt his peasant was idealised, as no one knew better than himself; but it was honesty of work in the place of dishonest idleness which he venerated. It was the glory of England to have produced such a thought far more than to have produced the men who, heavy with the plunder of unhappy peasants, stood boldly to their arms at Crecy and Poitiers.-GARDINER, SAMUEL RAWSON, 1890, Student's History of England, p. 259.

He seems to have had a hard life, for he speaks of himself as earning a scanty living by the performance of minor clerical duties, such as singing the placebo, dirige, and "the seven psalms," for the good of men's souls, and he often alludes. to his extreme poverty. Being married, he was, of course, only in minor orders, and thus could never rise to any rank in the Church. His poverty made him bitter. and proud, and he hated, he tells us, to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode, richly dressed in silver and miniver, adown Cheapside. But perhaps it was well for others that he was poor, for his world is the world of the poor; he tells of their life and labours, their toil and hunger, their rude merriment and their helpless despair, till the misery and even the narrow bitterness of their thought is reflected in his verse.-GIBBINS, H. DE B., 1892, English Social Reformers, p. 7.

Because Langland reveres virtue, many commentators have made a saint of him; because he condemns, as an abuse, the admission of peasants' sons to holy orders, they have it that he was born of good

family; and because he speaks in a bitter and passionate way of the wrongs of his time, they have made him out a radical reformer, aiming at profound changes in the religious and social order of things. He was nothing of all this. The energy of his language, the eloquence and force of his words may have given rise to this delusion. In reality, he is, from the religious and social points of view, one of those rare thinkers who defend moderate ideas with vehemence, and employ all the resources of a fiery spirit in the defence of common sense. JUSSERAND, J. J., 1894, Piers Plowman, A Contribution to the History of English Mysticism, p. 103.

The earliest poem of high value which we meet with in modern English literature is the thrilling and mysterious "Vision of Piers Plowman." According to the view which we choose to adopt, this brilliant satire may be taken as closing the mediæval fiction of England or as starting her modern popular poetry. One of

the greatest writers of the Middle Ages. In the "Vision of Piers Plowman" the great alliterative school of West-Midland verse culminated in a masterpiece, the prestige of which preserves that school from being a mere curiosity for the learned. In spite of its relative difficulty, "Piers Plowman" will now always remain, with the "Canterbury Tales," one of the two great popular classics of the fourteenth century.

It is an epitome of the social and political life of England, and particularly of London, seen from within and from below, without regard to what might be thought above and outside the class of workers. It is the foundation of the democratic literature of England, and a repository of picturesque observations absolutely unique and invaluable.--GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, A Short History of Modern English Literature, pp. 7, 8, 12.

Even Langland, a much more interesting and striking figure than Gower to us, could have been much better spared by his own generation than Gower himself. In literary form Langland had nothing to teach he was in fact merely rowing offstream, if not against it, up a backwater which led nowhither. In substance he was powerful rather than profitable, offering nothing but allegory, of which there was already only too much, and political

ecclesiastical discussion, a growth always nearer to the tares than to the wheat of literature. In other words, and to vary the metaphor, he gave the workmen in the new workshop of English letters no new or improved tools, he opened up to them no new sources of material. He was a genius, he was a seer, he was an artist; but he was neither master nor stock-provider in literature. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 141.

It is one thing to reach the public, quite another to reach the people; and the more difficult achievement was Langland's. His grave verse went straight to the heart of the still Teutonic race, indifferent to the facile French lilts of

Chaucer. Serfs and laborers, seemingly

three three Wat

inaccessible to influences of culture, as they staggered along under their heavy loads, eagerly welcomed the Visions of Piers the Plowman, of Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best. They heard, pondered, and repeated, till they realized that their souls had found utterance at last. The central version of the great poem-for the author rewrote it times antedated by only two or years the Peasants' Revolt under Tyler and John Ball. This was the first largely significant prophecy in England of a distinct industrial movement. Its inspiration was no gentle Christian idealism, such as stirred the followers of St. Francis, but a spirit of fierce rebellion, flinging itself with awakened intelligence and destructive ardor against established law. The first note of the social revolution is heard in its confused echoes. No one can trace the thrilling story of its hope and passions, and fail to see how potent had been the poem of Langland in arousing and shaping its ideals.

Phrases

from the poem were used as watchwords in the uprising; more than this, the central personage, the intensely conceived Piers the Plowman, became a spiritual presence to the laboring classes of England. In those days before telegram or press, association was difficult; this poem, quietly passing from lip to lip, helped bind together the scattered and voiceless workingmen of the eastern counties with a new sense of fellowship. Langland was thus a direct power, as few poets have ever been, upon an awakening national life. Art knows no classes;

and the self-expression of a class, though that class be the very heart of the nation, cannot be immortal. This is the book of the people; and the people, even when thinking, feeling, seeing aright, is yet unable, except by occasional chance, to find the inevitable word. The burden of the popular heart remains forever undelivered. This book is like all others that seek to give it. Sharing the people's sorrows, it shares also their fate: it is forgotten. SCUDDER, VIDA D., 1898, Social Ideals in English Letters, pp. 21, 24.

PIERS PLOWMAN CREED

1394?

"The Crede of Piers Ploughman," if is at least written by a scholar who fully not written by the author of the "Vision,' emulates his master; and Pope was so deeply struck with this little poem, that he has very carefully analyzed the whole. -DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1841, Piers Ploughman, Amenities of Literature.

The mention of Wycliffe and of Walter Brute and other circumstances, fix the date of "Piers Ploughman's Creed" with tolerable certainty in the latter years of the reign of Richard II. the reign of Richard II. It was probably written very soon after the year 1393, the date of the persecution of Walter Brute at Hereford; and from the particular allusion to that person we may perhaps suppose that like the Vision it was written on the Borders of Wales. -WRIGHT, THOMAS, 1842, ed. The Vision of Piers Ploughman, Introduction, p. xxiv, note.

This poem, consisting of 850 lines, was written in alliterative verse by a disciple of Wycliffe, whose name has not been ascertained. The title and form of it are both imitated from William Langland's more famous poem, known as "The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman." Though these two poems, the "Crede" and the "Vision," are, in fact, by different authors, and express different sentiments on some points, they are, to the disgrace of students of English literature, continually being confounded with each other. There is every reason to believe that the anonymous author of the "Crede" was also author of "The Plowman's Tale," a satirical poem which has often been wrongly ascribed to Chaucer. -SKEAT, WALTER W., 1871, Specimens of English Literature, 1394–1579, p. 1.