precepts, how the conduct of individuals and the general management of society may be amended. In the third and fourth cantos, Mede or Bribery is exhibited, seeking a marriage with Falsehood, and attempting to make her way to the courts of justice, where it appears that she has many friends, both among the civil judges and ecclesiastics. The poem after this becomes more and more desultory. The author awakens more than once; but, forgetting that he has told us so, continues to converse as freely as ever with the moral phantasmagoria of his dream. A long train of allegorical personages, whom it would not be very amusing to enumerate, succeeds. In fact, notwithstanding Dr. Whitaker's discovery of a plan and unity in this work, I cannot help thinking, with Warton, that it possesses neither; at least, if it has any design, it is the most vague and ill-constructed that ever entered into the brain of a waking dreamer. The appearance of the visionary personages is often sufficiently whimsical. The power of Grace, for instance, confers upon Piers Plowman, or "Christian Life," four stout oxen, to cultivate the field of Truth; these are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the last of whom is described as the gentlest of the team. She afterwards assigns him the like number of stots or bullocks, to harrow what the evangelists had ploughed; and this new horned team consists of Saint or stot Ambrose, stot Austin, stot Gregory, and stot Jerome.*

The verse of Langlande is alliterative, without rhyme, and of triple time. In modern pronunciation it divides the ear between an anapæstic and dactylic cadence; though some of the verses are reducible to no perceptible metre. Mr. Mitford, in his 'Harmony of Languages,' thinks that the more we accommodate the reading of it to ancient pronunciation, the more generally we shall find it run in an anapæstic measure. His style, even making allowance for its antiquity, has a vulgar air, and seems to indicate a mind that would have been coarse, though strong, in any state of society. But, on the other hand, his work, with all its tiresome homilies, illustrations from school divinity, and uncouth phraseology, has some interesting features of originality.

* [If some of the criticisms in this genial Essay prove rather startling to the zealous admirer of our early literature, he will attribute them to the same cause which, during an age of romantic poetry, makes the effusions of Mr. Campbell's Muse appear an echo of the chaste simplicity and measured energy of Attic song.—Price, Warton, vol. i. p. 107.]

He employs no borrowed materials; he is the earliest of our writers in whom there is a tone of moral reflection; and his sentiments are those of bold and solid integrity. The zeal of truth was in him; and his vehement manner sometimes rises to eloquence, when he denounces hypocrisy and imposture. The mind is struck with his rude voice, proclaiming independent and popular sentiments from an age of slavery and superstition, and thundering a prediction in the ear of papacy, which was doomed to be literally fulfilled at the distance of nearly two hundred years. His allusions to contemporary life afford some amusing glimpses of its manners. There is room to suspect that Spenser was acquainted with his works; and Milton, either from accident or design, has the appearance of having had one of Langlande's passages in his mind when he wrote the sublime description of the lazar-house, in 'Paradise Lost.'*

Chaucer was probably known and distinguished as a poet anterior to the appearance of Langlande's 'Visions.' Indeed, if he had produced nothing else than his youthful poem, 'The Court of Love,' it was sufficient to indicate one destined to harmonise and refine the national strains. But it is likely that before his thirty-fourth year, about which time Langlande's 'Visions' may be supposed to have been finished, Chaucer had given several compositions to the public.

The simple old narrative romance had become too familiar in Chaucer's time to invite him to its beaten track. The poverty of his native tongue obliged him to look round for subsidiary materials to his fancy, both in the Latin language and in some modern foreign source that should not appear to be trite and exhausted. His age was, unfortunately, little conversant with the best Latin classics. Ovid, Claudian, and Statius were the chief favourites in poetry, and Boethius in prose.† The allegorical style of the last of those authors seems to have given an early bias to the taste of Chaucer. In modern poetry, his first and long-continued predilection was attracted by the new and

* [B. xi. l. 475, &c. This coincidence is remarked by Mrs. Cooper in her Muses' Library.'-Ellis, vol. i. p. 157.]

+ [The 'Consolation of Boethius' was translated by Alfred the Great and by Queen Elizabeth. No unfair proof of its extraordinary popularity may be derived from 'The Quair' of King James I. It seems to have been a truly regal book.]

allegorical style of romance which had sprung up in France in the thirteenth century, under William de Lorris. We find him, accordingly, during a great part of his poetical career, engaged among the dreams, emblems, flower-worshippings, and amatory parliaments of that visionary school. This, we may say, was a gymnasium of rather too light and playful exercise for so strong a genius; and it must be owned that his allegorical poetry is often puerile and prolix. Yet, even in this walk of fiction, we never entirely lose sight of that peculiar grace and gaiety which distinguish the Muse of Chaucer; and no one who remembers his productions of 'The House of Fame,' and 'The Flower and the Leaf,' will regret that he sported for a season in the field of allegory. Even his pieces of this description the most fantastic in design and tedious in execution are generally interspersed with fresh and joyous descriptions of external nature.

In this new species of romance, we perceive the youthful Muse of the language in love with mystical meanings and forms of fancy, more remote, if possible, from reality than those of the chivalrous fable itself; and we could sometimes wish her back from her emblematic castles to the more solid ones of the elder fable; but still she moves in pursuit of those shadows with an impulse of novelty, and an exuberance of spirit, that is not wholly without its attraction and delight.

Chaucer was afterwards happily drawn to the more natural style of Boccaccio, and from him he derived the hint of a subject * in which, besides his own original portraits of contemporary life, he could introduce stories of every description, from the most heroic to the most familiar.

Gower, though he had been earlier distinguished in French poetry, began later than Chaucer to cultivate his native tongue. His Confessio Amantis,' the only work by which he is known as an English poet, did not appear till the sixteenth year of Richard II. He must have been a highly accomplished man for his time, and imbued with a studious and mild spirit of reflection. His French sonnets are marked by elegance and sensibility, and his English poetry contains a digest of all that constituted the knowledge of his age. His contemporaries greatly esteemed him; and the Scottish as well as English writers of the subse

* [The Canterbury Tales.]

*

quent period speak of him with unqualified admiration. But though the placid and moral Gower might be a civilising spirit among his contemporaries, his character has none of the bold originality which stamps an influence on the literature of a country. He was not, like Chaucer, a patriarch in the family of genius, the scattered traits of whose resemblance may be seen in such descendants as Shakspeare and Spenser. The design of his Confessio Amantis' is peculiarly ill contrived. A lover, whose case has not a particle of interest, applies, according to the Catholic ritual, to a confessor, who, at the same time, whimsically enough, bears the additional character of a pagan priest of Venus. The holy father, it is true, speaks like a good Christian, and communicates more scandal about the intrigues of Venus than pagan author ever told. A pretext is afforded by the ceremony of confession for the priest not only to initiate his pupil in the duties of a lover, but in a wide range of ethical and physical knowledge; and at the mention of every virtue and vice a tale is introduced by way of illustration. Does the confessor wish to warn the lover against impertinent curiosity? he introduces, à propos to that failing, the history of Actæon, of peeping memory. The confessor inquires if he is addicted to a vainglorious disposition; because, if he is, he can tell him a story about Nebuchadnezzar. Does he wish to hear of the virtue of conjugal patience? it is aptly inculcated by the anecdote respecting Socrates, who, when he received the contents of Xantippe's pail upon his head, replied to the provocation with only a witticism. Thus, with shriving, narrations, and didactic speeches, the work is extended to thirty thousand lines, in the course of which the virtues and vices are all regularly allegorized. But in allegory Gower is cold and uninventive, and enumerates qualities when he should conjure up visible objects. On the whole, though copiously stored with facts and fables, he is unable either to make truth appear poetical, or to render fiction the graceful vehicle of truth.

* [Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax. Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease.-Dryden, Malone, vol. iv. p. 592.]

D

PART II.

WARTON, with great beauty and justice, compares the appearance of Chaucer in our language to a premature day in an English spring; after which the gloom of winter returns, and the buds and blossoms, which have been called forth by a transient sunshine, are nipped by frosts and scattered by storms. The causes of the relapse of our poetry, after Chaucer, seem but too apparent in the annals of English history, which during five reigns of the fifteenth century continue to display but a tissue of conspiracies, proscriptions, and bloodshed. Inferior even to France in literary progress, England displays in the fifteenth century a still more mortifying contrast with Italy. Italy too had her religious schisms and public distractions; but her arts and literature had always a sheltering place. They were even cherished by the rivalship of independent communities, and received encouragement from the opposite sources of commercial and ecclesiastical wealth. But we had no Nicholas V., nor house of Medicis. In England the evils of civil war agitated society as one mass. There was no refuge from them—no enclosure to fence in the field of improvement-no mound to stem the torrent of public troubles. Before the death of Henry VI., it is said that one half of the nobility and gentry in the kingdom had perished in the field or on the scaffold. Whilst in England the public spirit was thus brutalised, whilst the value and security of life were abridged, whilst the wealth of the rich was employed only in war, and the chance of patronage taken from the scholar, in Italy princes and magistrates vied with each other in calling men of genius around them, as the brightest ornaments of their states and courts. The art of printing came to Italy to record the treasures of its literary attainments; but when it came to England, with a very few exceptions, it could not be said, for the purpose of diffusing native literature, to be a necessary art. A circumstance, additionally hostile to the