wayside. There are people who are better at praying than at doing their daily work well. Some knights and soldiers who cannot plough are useful in fighting for Piers, defending him and his workers. Hunger comes and punishes the idlers. By this the poet means to show how the people had helped to bring on their own misery. But the faithful workers are rewarded by a pardon from Truth, promising them eternal life.

15. In the last part of the poem we have the search for Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best, who are at last all three found united in Piers Plowman, who here represents Christ himself: Christ as Do-wel, when, by obedience to his earthly parents and patient work as a carpenter, he fulfilled his duty to God and to man; as Do-bet, in his last years on earth, when he went about doing good and healing sin and suffering, his love overflowing into unselfish service; and as Do-best, when by his cruel death he sent his Holy Spirit into the world, becoming the light and the life of men. Thus, as Gower and Wiclif also had shown, each in a different way, obedience to God and the imitation of Christ's life and love would alone cure the evils and miseries from which the people suffered. All three were surely God's Englishmen, sent, as the prophets of old were sent, to preach repentance and to point the way to a higher and holier life.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SEED-TIME OF SHAKESPEARE'S AGE.

1. For some time after the death of Chaucer, Gower, Wiclif, and Langland, no very great writer appeared in England, so that some people said, as people are sure to say, "English literature has seen its best days." There are people who say so now. But we never can speak with such certainty, and may be as much mistaken in this as the people of those days were. Though these four great men were dead, their influence still lived in the English people. The search after truth was still carried on. One clergyman, indeed, spoke up so bravely for

the Lollards, as the followers of Wiclif were called, that his book was burned and he himself was shut up in an abbey, with no opportunity of writing any more, and no books but a Bible and prayer-book. That man was REGINALD PECOCK, Bishop of Chichester.

2. And although there were no great poems and no great poets, yet Chaucer and Langland had taught people how to find out the beautiful and the true in the simple things of daily life; and ballads which all could understand were written, some of them perhaps by noble women, and the people learned and sang them in their houses over their daily work. Such ballads were those about Robin Hood, The Nut Brown Maid, and Chevy Chase. Two poets called JOHN LYDGATE and THOMAS OCCLEVE wrote poetry of the kind Chaucer had taught them to admire.

3. But the time was one rather of preparation than of great work in literature. Several things happened just about that time to make England a busier, richer, and nobler country than she had ever been. Scholars at Oxford and other places in England began to learn and to teach the Greek language, which they had first learned in Italy from Greeks who had been driven out of Constantinople by the Turks. The Greek literature, with its treasures of poetry, plays, histories, and philosophy, was like a bright and beautiful new world to the scholars of Europe.

4. The writings of an old Greek named Plato1 helped the people greatly in their search for truth; for he taught how much more important was the life of the soul than that of the body, and that we must, therefore, always be striving to make our body the servant of the soul, and in every way fit our soul for the higher life from which it came, and to which it will one day return. In a rich and prosperous country like England, we can never sufficiently remember this; and in the fifteenth century the Church, especially in its luxury and self-indulgence, needed the lesson of simplicity and unselfishness; so that we may say that the study of Plato helped on the Reformation.

5. A second event that was opening out the minds of English

1 Plato. He taught philosophy at Athens, and left a number of writings in

the form of "Dialogues." Born 429 B.C.; died 347 B.C.

people was the discovery of America by Columbus.1 The stories about those countries, and the beautiful treasures brought back from them by sailors and travellers, made people at home realize that after all there was yet much to see and learn. Now, too, there was peace in England, and prosperity began to return after the terrible War of the Roses.2 So people had leisure and money to spend on books; and books were more easily got, for printing had been invented, and Caxton's printing-press at Westminster had begun to send out copies of the poems of Chaucer, and also older English works, such as the Arthur legends: so that now, more than ever before, the influence of dead authors was felt in England.

6. But already great living scholars and writers were appearing again. At Oxford a good man named JOHN COLET was doing noble work lecturing on the Greek Testament, which he had gone to Italy to learn to read, and spending the fortune left him by his father, not on himself, but on a school called St. Paul's which he had founded. The school, which is now a famous one, was dedicated to the child Jesus, whose image stood over the doorway. To these children of St. Paul's, Colet sent this request: "Lift up your little white hands to God for me, who prayeth for you to God."

7. Among the Greek scholars of this good Colet were two who afterwards became famous men-a Dutchman named ERASMUS, and an English lad named THOMAS MORE. More was a

London boy, the son of a judge, and had lived in the house of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. There he would likely wait behind the cardinal's chair, and hear the conversation of the learned guests, many of whom agreed with the cardinal that the bright, clever boy would one day be a great man. So the cardinal sent More to Oxford.

8. When he had learned Greek, and had begun, too, to seek for truth, he returned to London, studied law, and became a

1 Columbus, Christopher, a Genoese navigator, who, in 1492, led an expedition fitted out by the Spanish Crown, which resulted in the discovery of America.

royal Houses of York and Lancaster (14501485). The war was so called from the badges of the rival armies-the ensign of the House of York being a white, that of

2 War of the Rose, waged between the the House of Lancaster a red rose.

member of Parliament. Though only twenty-one years of age, he was brave enough to speak up when he thought the king was wrong in asking for money from the people of England for his daughter's dower that daughter who married James the Fourth of Scotland. If Henry the Seventh had not died soon afterwards, Thomas More might never have prospered. As it was, he lost his position as lawyer for a time. But he was too clever to lack work, and people were always eager to have him plead for them, though he never would take up an unjust

cause.

9. For a time he seems to have been both prosperous and happy. Erasmus and others who visited him tell us of his bright and beautiful home at Chelsea, where every one was cheerful and busy: his wife with her household duties; his four daughters with their tutor and their books; their father with his studies, his writing, or walking with his guests in their fine old garden. Sir Thomas More thought girls should learn much the same things as boys, and all his daughters were good Greek and Latin scholars, especially the youngest, Meg, who wrote her father such a beautiful Latin letter that the Bishop of Exeter, when he saw it, was so pleased that he sent her a present. Even after the daughters married they often returned with their husbands and children to the old Chelsea home, where, Erasmus tells us, "no quarrelling nor intemperate words were ever heard; idleness was never seen.”

10. In 1515 More was sent by King Henry the Eighth, whose friend he had become, on a mission to Flanders. While there, he began to write his great book Utopia,1 in which he describes a country in a state of almost perfect happiness, under a good and wise government. All the children in Utopia were to have a good education, and when they left school were to continue their education, going to lectures and giving up some hours every day to study. Every one was to work, but only a certain time each day, with ample time for thinking, reading, and recreation. Everything and everybody was to be ruled by

1 Utopia, from two Greek words, meaning "nowhere."

love, not by self-interest.

Utopia was written in Latin, which all learned men in Europe could read.

11. In the same year as it appeared, Erasmus published his Greek Testament, and a few years later Tyndale's New Testament began to be read in England. Martin Luther1 had separated himself from the Church of Rome, and was fighting for the Reformed faith. But, for all his learning and wisdom, More felt he could not side with those Reformers, as they began to be called. He thought there could be only one Church, and that it could be restored to its original purity.

12. So when the king dismissed Wolsey, and resolved to separate the English Church from that of Rome, because neither Wolsey nor the Pope agreed to his divorcing Katharine of Aragon, More, though he was Lord Chancellor and a great favourite with the king, yet would not take the oath acknowledging the king to be head of the Church. So the happy home was broken up; the kind father was sent to the Tower; and the neck around which the king's arm had often lovingly twined fell beneath the axe of the headsman on Tower Hill.

13. On the side of the Reformers there were many who fought as nobly as Sir Thomas More, and like him were ready to die for their faith. One of the bravest was HUGH LATIMER, a bold preacher of the Reformed faith. His father was a farmer in Leicestershire, as brave, honest, and thrifty an English yeoman as ever buckled on sword in the king's service. He and his wife and six daughters worked hard on the farm and in the house, and Hugh worked just as hard in his way at school and college. He was sent to Cambridge when he was fourteen, and when only twenty-four was made professor of Greek there.

14. He had been ordained a priest of the Romish Church, but was converted to the Reformed faith on the day he was made Bachelor of Arts, and from that time he held stanchly to the Protestant cause. Though Wolsey charged him with heresy, he was not forbidden to preach, as the king himself had gone

1 Martin Luther, the great German Reformer. He translated the Bible into the German tongue. Born 1483; died 1546.