is seen in the others till we come to Matthew Paris, whose view of history is entirely that of an Englishman. When he wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, Norman abbot and English priest, were, and are in his pages, one in blood and one in interests.

6

MANDEVILLE.-He is called the first writer in formed English.' Chaucer himself, however, wrote some things, and especially one of his Tales, in rhythmical prose, and John of Trevisa translated into English prose, 1387,. Higden's Polychronicon. MANDEVILLE wrote his Travels first in Latin, then in French, and finally put them into the English tongue about 1356, 'that every man of the nation might understand them.' His quaint delight in telling his traveller's tales,' and sometimes the grace with which he tells them rank him among the story-tellers of England.

WYCLIF.-At the time the Vision of Langland was being read all over England, JOHN WYCLIF, about 1380, began his work in the English tongue with a nearly complete translation of the Bible, and in it did as much probably to fix the language as Chaucer did in his Tales. But he did much more than this for the English tongue. He made it the popular language of religious thought and feeling. In 1381 he was in full battle with the Church on the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was condemned to silence. He replied by appealing to the whole of England in the speech of the people. He sent forth tract after tract, sermon after sermon, couched not in the dry, philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in short, sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all the doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the Church of Rome. He was the first Protestant. It was a new literary vein to open, the vein of the pamphleteer.

RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN LANGLAND AND WYCLIF.-We have traced the work of transition English,' as it has been called, along the lines of popular religion and story-telling.

The first of these, in the realm of poetry, reaches its goal in the work of William Langland; in the realm of prose it reaches its goal in Wyclif. In both these writers, the work differs from any that went before it by its extraordinary power, and by the depth of its religious feeling. It is plain that it represented a society much more strongly moved by religion than that of the beginning of the fourteenth century. In Wyclif, the voice comes from the university, and it went all over the land in the body of preachers whom, like Wesley, he sent forth. In Langland's Vision, we have a voice from the centre of the people themselves; his poem is written in a rude English dialect, in alliterative English verse, and in the old English manner. The very ploughboy could understand it. It became the book of those who desired social and Church reform. It was as eagerly read by the free laborers and fugitive serfs who collected round John Ball and Wat Tyler.

CAUSES OF THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL.-This was originally due to the preaching of the Friars in the last century and to the noble example they set of devotion to the poor. When the Friars, however, became rich, though pretending to be poor, and impure of life, though pretending to goodness, the rcligious feeling they had stirred turned against themselves, and its two strongest cries, both on the Continent and in England, were for Truth and for Purity in life and in the Church.

Another cause, common to the Continent and to England in this century, was the movement for the equal rights of man against the class system of the middle ages. It was made a religious movement when men said that they were equal before God, and that goodness in his eyes was the only nobility. And it brought with it a religious protest against the oppression of the people by the class of the nobles.

There were two other causes, however, special to England at this time. One was the utter misery of the people owing to the French wars. Heavy taxation fell upon them, and

they were ground down by severe laws, which prevented their bettering themselves. They felt this all the more because so many of them had bought their freedom, and began to feel the delight of freedom. It was then that in their misery they turned to religion, not only as their sole refuge, but as supplying them with reasons for a social revolution. The other cause was the Black Death, the great Plague which, in 1349, '62, and '69, swept over England. Grass grew in the towns; whole villages were left uninhabited; a wild panic fell upon the people, which was added to by a terrible tempest in 1362 that to men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their terror then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion.

THE KING'S ENGLISH.-We have thus traced the rise of English literature to the time of Chaucer. We must now complete the sketch by a word or two on the language in which it was written. The literary English language seemed at first to be destroyed by the Conquest. It lingered till Stephen's death in the English Chronicle; a few traces of it are still found about the time of Henry III.'s death in the Brut of Layamon. But, practically speaking, from the 12th century till the middle of the 14th, there was no standard of English. The language, spoken only by the people, fell back into that broken state of anarchy in which each part of the country has its own dialect, and each writer uses the dialect of his own dwelling-place. All the poems, then, of which we have spoken were written in dialects of English, not in a fixed English common to all writers. French or Latin was the language of literature and of the literary class. But towards the middle of Edward the Third's reign, English got the better of French. After the Black Death in 1349, French was less used; in 1362 English was made the language of the courts of law. At the same time a standard English language was born. It did not overthrow the dialects, for the Vision of Piers the Plowman and Wyclif's Translation of the Bible are both in a dialect; but it stood forth as the literary lan

guage in which all future English literature had to be written. It had been growing up in Robert of Brunne's work, and in the Romance of King Alexander; but it was fixed into clear form by Chaucer and Gower. It was, in fact, the English language talked in the Court and in the Court society to which these poets belonged. It was the King's English, and the fact that it was the tongue of the best and most cultivated society, as well as the great excellence of the works written in it by these poets made it at once the tongue of literature."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. WYCLIF.-F. Myers' Lectures; R. Vaughan's Life and Opinions of; W. Hanna's Wyclif and the Huguenots; N. Br. Rev., v. 20, 1853-4; Quar. Rev., v. 104, 1858; West. Rev., v. 62, 1854; Green's Hist. England, and other histories of Eng.

CHAUCER.

LESSON 10.

HIS FRENCH PERIOD.—“ GEOFFREY CHAUCER was the son of a vintner, of Thames Street, London, and was born, it is now believed, in 1340. He lived almost all his life in London, in the centre of its work and society. When he was sixteen, he became page to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and continued at the Court till he joined the army in France in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but was ransomed before the treaty of Bretigny in 1360. We then know nothing of his life for six years; but, from items in the Exchequer Rolls, we find that he was again connected with the Court from 1366 to 1372. It was during this time that he began to write. His first poem may have been the A, B, C, a prayer Englished from the French at the request of the Duchess Blanche. The translation of the Romaunt of the Rose has been attributed to him, but the best critics are doubtful of, or deny, his authorship of it. They are sure of only two poems, the Compleynte to Pity in 1368, and in the next year the Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, whose husband, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's patron. These, written under the influence of French poetry, are classed under the name of Chaucer's first period. There are lines in them which seem

to speak of a luckless love affair, and in this broken love it has been supposed that we find the key to Chaucer's early life. CHAUCER'S ITALIAN PERIOD.-Chaucer's second poetic period may be called the period of Italian influence, from 1372 to 1384. During these years he went for the king on no less than seven diplomatic missions. Three of these, in 1372, '74, and '78, were to Italy. At that time the great Italian literature which inspired then, and still inspires, European literature, had reached full growth, and it opened to Chaucer a new world of art. If he read the Vita Nuova, and the Divina Commedia of Dante, he knew for the first time the power and range of poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, and he learnt what is meant by 'form' in poetry. He read the tales of Boccaccio, who made Italian prose, and in them he first saw how to tell a story exquisitely. Petrarca and Boccaccio he may even have met, for they died in 1374 and 1375, but he never saw Dante, who died at Ravenna in 1321. When he came back from these journeys, he was a new man. He threw aside the romantic poetry of France, and laughed at it in his gay and kindly manner in the Rime of Sir Thopas, afterwards made one of the Canterbury Tales.

His chief work of this time bears witness to the influence of Italy. It was Troylus and Creseide, 1382 (?), which is a translation, with many changes and additions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. The additions (and he nearly doubled the poem) are stamped with his own peculiar tenderness, vividness, and simplicity. His changes from the original are all towards the side of purity, good taste, and piety. We meet the further influence of Boccaccio in the birth of some of the Canterbury Tales, and of Petrarca in the Tales themselves. To this time is now referred the tale of the Second Nun, that of the Doctor, the Man of Law, the Clerk, the Prioress, the Squire, the Franklin, Sir Thopas, and the first draft of the Knight's Tale, borrowed, with much freedom, from the Teseide of Boccaccio.