might find it there; or if your majesty pleased to get it by heart, I will lend you my book.” The king accepted the offer. Some of the new-made lords fretted and bit their thumbs at certain passages in the marquess's discourse; and some protested that no man was so much for the absolute power of a king as Aristotle. The marquess told the king that he would indeed show him one remarkable passage to that purpose, and turning to the place, read "A king can kill, a king can save; A king can make a lord a knave; On this several new-made lords slank out of the room, which the king observing, told the marquess, "My lord, at this rate you will drive away all my nobility." This amusing anecdote is an evidence that this ethical poet, after two centuries and a half, was not forgotten; his spirit was still vital, his volume still lay open on the library table ; it afforded a pungent lesson to the courtiers of Charles the First, as it had to those of Richard the Second. Gower was learned, didactic, and dignified. The manuscripts of his work are usually noble and sumptuous copies; more elegantly written and more richly illuminated than the works of other poets. His common-places and his legendary lore seem to have awed the simplicity of the readers of two centuries, whose taste did not yet feel that failure of the poet who narrated a fable from Ovid with the dull prolixity of a matter-of-fact chronicler. His fictions are rarely imaginative; yet critics, far abler judges of his relative merits than ourselves, since they lived within the sphere of his influence, hailed this grave father of our poesy. Leland, the royal antiquary of Henry the Eighth, expressed his ideas with great elegance and sensibility, when he said of Gower that "his diligent culture of our poesy had extirpated the ordinary herbs; and that the soft violet and the purple narcissus were now growing, where erst was nothing seen but the thistle and the thorn." There are indeed some graceful flowers in his desert. But all criticism is usually relative to the age, and excellence is always comparative. Gower stamped with the force of ethical reasoning his smooth rhymes; and this was a near approach to poetry itself. If in the mind of Chaucer we are more sensible of the impulses of genius - those creative and fugitive touches his diction is more mixed and unsettled than the tranquil elegance of Gower, who has often many pointed sentences and a surprising neatness of phrase. A modern reader, I think, would find the style of Gower more easily intelligible than the higher efforts of the more inventive poet. 203 PIERS PLOUGHMAN. CONTEMPORARY with Gower and Chaucer lived the singular author of "The Visions of William concerning Piers Ploughman;" singular in more respects than one, for his subject, his style, and, we may add, for the intrepidity and the force of his genius. This extraordinary work is ascribed to one whose name is merely traditional, to Robert Langland, a secular priest of Salop; when he wrote, and where he died, are as dubious as his text, the authenticity of which is often uncertain from the variations in all the manuscripts. But the real life of an author, at least for posterity, lies beyond the grave; and no writer is nameless whose volume has descended to us as one of the most memorable in our ancient vernacular literature. In character, in execution, and in design, "The Visions of William of Piers Ploughman" are wholly separated from the polished poems of Gower and Chaucer; the work bears no trace of their manner, nor of their refinement, nor of their versification; and it has baffled conjectural criticism to assign the exact period of a composition which appears more ancient than any supposed contemporary writings. Those who would decide of the time in which an author wrote by his style, here are at a loss to conceive that the splendid era of romantic chivalry, the age of Edward the Third and his grandson, which produced the curious learning and the easy rhymes of the "Confessio Amantis," and the pleasantry and the fine discriminations of character of "The Canterbury Tales," could have given birth to the antiquated Saxon and rustic pith of this genuine English bard. Either his labor was concluded ere the writings of the court poets had travelled to our obscure country priest in his seclusion in a distant county, or else he disdained their exotic fancies, their Latinisms, their Gallicisms, and their Italianisms, and their trivial rhymes, that in every respect he might remain their astonishing contrast, with no inferiority of genius. There was no philosophical criticism in the censure of this poet by Warton, when he condemns him for not having "availed himself of the rising and rapid improvements of the English language," and censures him for his "affectation of obsolete English." These rising improvements may never have reached our bard, or if they had, he might have disdained them; for the writer of the Visions concerning Piers Ploughman was strictly a national poet; and there was no "affectation of obsolete English" in a poet preserving the forms of his native idiom, and avoiding all exotic novelties in the energy of his Anglo-Saxon genius. His uncontaminated mind returned to or continued the AngloSaxon alliterative metre and unrhymed verse; he trusted its cadence to the ear, scorning the subjection of rhyme. Webbe, a critic of the age of Elizabeth, considered this poet as "the first who had observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme." It is useless to give the skeleton of a desultory and tedious allegorical narrative. The last editor, Dr. Whitaker, imagined that "he for the first time had shown, that it was written after a regular and consistent design," notwithstanding that he himself confesses, that "the conclusion is singularly cold and comfortless, and leaves the inquirer, after a long peregrination, still remote from the object of his search," - a conclusion where nothing is concluded! The visionist might have been overtaken by sleep among the bushes of the Malvern Hills for twenty cantos more, without at all deranging anything which he had said, or inconveniencing anything which he might say. In truth, it is a heap of rhapsodies, without any artifice of connexion or involution of plot, or any sustained interest of one actor more than another among the numerous ideal beings who flit along the dreamy scenes. The true spirit of this imaginative work is more comprehensible than any settled design. That mysterious or mythical personage, "Piers Ploughman," is the representative of "the Universal church," say Dr. Whitaker; or "Christian life," says Mr. Campbell. What he may be is very doubtful, for we have "True Religion," a fair lady who puts in surely a higher claim to represent "the Universal Church," or "Christian life," than "the Ploughman," who has to till his half-acre and save his idling companions from "waste" and "want." The most important personage is " Mede," or bribery, who seems to exert an extraordinary influence over the Bench, and the Bar, and the Church, and through every profession which occurred to the poet. The pearls in these waters lie not on the surface. The visionist had deeper thoughts and more concealed feelings than those rhapsodical phantoms. In a general survey of society, he contemplates on the court and the clergy, glancing through all the diversified ranks of the laity, not sparing the people themselves, as their awful reprover. It was a voice from the wilderness in the language of the people. The children of want and oppression had found their solitary advocate. The prelacy, dissolved in the luxuriousness of papal pomp, and a barbarous aristocracy, with their rapacious dependants, were mindless of the morals or the happiness of those human herds, whose heads were counted, but whose hearts they could never call their own. We are curious to learn, in this disordered state of the commonwealth, the political opinions entertained by this sage. They are as mysterious as Piers Ploughman himself. Passive obedience to the higher powers is inculcated, apparently rather for its prudence than its duty. This we infer from his lively parable of “the Cat of a Court,” and "A Route of Ratones and Small Mice." "Grimalkin, though sometimes apt to play the tyrant when appetite was sharp, would often come laughing and leaping among them. Α rat, a whisker of renown, cunningly proposed to adorn the VOL. I.-18 |