the end grows in Chaucer's hands into a poetry of the court and of high society, a literary in contrast with a popular, poetry. But even in this the spirit of the poetry is English, though the manner is French. Chaucer becomes less French and even less Italian, till at last we find him entirely national in the Canterbury Tales, the best example of English story-telling we possess. The struggle, then, of England, against the foreigner, to become and remain England finds its parallel in the struggle of English poetry, against the influence of foreign poetry, to become and remain English. Both struggles were long and wearisome, but in both England was triumphant. She became a nation, and she won a national literature. It is the steps of this struggle we have now to trace along the two lines already laid down-the poetry of religion and the poetry of story-telling; but to do so we must begin in both instances with the Norman Conquest.

THE RELIGIOUS POETRY.-The religious revival of the 11th century was strongly felt in Normandy, and both the knights and the Churchmen who came to England with William the Conqueror and during his son's reign were founders of abbeys whence the country was civilized. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of England was further quickened by missionary monks sent by Bernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to rebuild St. Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well-watered valleys of the North. The English citizens of London and the English peasants in the country received a new religious life from the foreign noble and the foreign monk, and both were drawn together through a common worship. When this took place, a desire arose for religious hand-books in the English tongue. ORMIN's Ormulum is a type of these. We may date it, though not precisely, at 1215, the date of the Great Charter. It is entirely English, not five French words are to be found in it. It is a metrical version of the service of each day with the addition of a sermon in verse. The book was called Ormulum, 'for this that Orm it wrought,' Orm being a con

traction for Ormin. It marks the rise of English religious literature, and its religion is simple and rustic. Orm's ideal monk is to be a very pure man, and altogether without property, except that he shall be found in simple meat and clothes.' He will have a hard and stiff and rough and heavy life to lead. All his heart and desire ought to be aye

toward heaven, and his Master well to serve.' This was English religion in the country at this date.

LITERATURE AND THE FRIARS.—There was little religion in the towns, but this was soon changed. In 1221 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and they chose the towns for their work. Their influence was great, and they drew Norman and English more closely together on the ground of religion. In 1303 ROBERT OF BRUNNE translated a French poem, the Manual of Sins (written thirty years earlier by William of Waddington), under the title of Handlyng Sinne. WILLIAM OF SHOREHAM translated the whole of the Psalter into English prose about 1327, and wrote religious poems. The Cursor Mundi, written about 1320, and thought the best book of all' by men of that time, was a metrical version of the Old and the New Testament, interspersed, as was the Handlyng Sinne, with legends of saints. Some scattered Sermons, and in 1340 the Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience), translated from the French, mark how English prose was rising through religion. About the same year RICHARD ROLLE OF HAMPOLE wrote in Latin, and in Northumbrian English for the 'unlearned,' a poem called the Pricke of Conscience, and some prose treatises. The poem marks the close of the religious influence of the Friars.

In the Vision of Piers the Plowman, the protest its writer makes for purity of life is also a protest against the foul life and the hypocrisy of the Friars. In this poem, the whole of the popular English religion of the time of Chaucer is represented. In it also the natural, unliterary, country English is best represented. Its author, WILLIAM LANGLAND, though we

are not certain of his Christian name, was born about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. His Vision begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in the country in 1362. At the accession of Richard II., 1377, he was in London. The great popularity of his poem made him in that year, and again in the year 1393, send forth two more texts of his poem. In these texts he added to the original Vision the poems of Do Wel, Do Bet, and Do Best. In 1399 he wrote at Bristol his last poem, The Deposition of Richard II., and then died, probably in 1400.

He paints his portrait as he was when he lived in Cornhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men called Long Will; clothed in the black robes in which he sung for a few pence at the funerals of the rich; hating to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the lords and ladies that rode by in silver and furs as he stalked in observant moodiness along the Strand. It is this figure which in indignant sorrow walks through the whole poem.

HIS VISION.-The dream of the 'field full of folk,' with which it begins, brings together nearly as many typical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do. In the first part, the Truth sought for is righteous dealing in Church and Law and State. In the second part, the Truth sought for is that of righteous life. None of those who wish to find Truth know the way till Piers the Plowman, who at last enters the poem, directs them aright. The search for a righteous life is a search to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the three titles of the poems which were added afterwards. In a series of dreams and a highly-wrought allegory, Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best are identified with Jesus Christ, who appears at last as Love, in the dress of Piers the Plowman. The second of these poems describes Christ's death, his struggle with sin, his resurrection, and the victory over Death and the Devil. And the dreamer wakes in a transport of joy, with the Easter

chimes pealing in his ears. But as Langland looked round on the world, the victory did not seem real, and the stern dreamer passed out of triumph into the dark sorrow in which he lived. He dreams again in Do Best, and sees, as Christ leaves the earth, the reign of Antichrist. Evils attack the Church and mankind. Envy, Pride, and Sloth, helped by the Friars, besiege Conscience. Conscience cries on Contrition to help him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, all but despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to wander over the world, praying for luck and health, 'till he have Piers the Plowman,' till he find the Saviour.

This is the poem which wrought so strongly in men's minds that its influence was almost as great as Wyclif's in the revolt which had now begun against Latin Christianity. Its fame was so great that it produced imitators. About 1394 another alliterative poem was set forth by an unknown author, with the title of Pierce the Plowman's Crede, and the Plowman's Tale, wrongly attributed to Chaucer, is another witness to the popularity of Langland."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. ORMULUM AND PIERS PLOWMAN.-G. P. Marsh's Lectures on Eng. Lang., Lectures V., VI., XIX., and XXIV.; Marsh's Or. and Hist. Eng. Lang., Lectures IV. and VII. Also many works referred to at the end of Lesson 3.

LESSON 8.

ENGLISH STORY-TELLING POETRY.- "This grew out of historical literature. There was a Welsh priest at the court of Henry I., called GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH, who took upon himself to write history. He had been given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to translate, which told in verse the history of Britain from the days when Brut, the great grandson of Eneas, landed on its shores, through the whole history of King Arthur and his Round Table down to Cadwallo, a Welsh king who died in 689. The Latin translation he made of this he called a history. The real historians were angry at the fiction, and declared that throughout the whole of it he had lied saucily and shamelessly.' It was indeed only a clever putting together of a number of Welsh legends, but it was the beginning of story-telling in England. Every one who read it was delighted with it; it made, as we should say, a sensation, and as much on the Continent as in England. In it the Welsh had in some sort their revenge, for in its stories they invaded English literature, and their tales have never since ceased to live in it. They charm us as much in Tennyson's Idylls of the King as they charmed the people in the days of Henry I. But the stories Geoffrey of Monmouth told were in the Latin tongue. They were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar. They got afterwards to France and, added to from Breton legends, were made into a poem and decked out with the ornaments of French romance. In that form they returned to England as the work of Wace, a Norman trouveur, who called his poem the Brut, and completed it in 1155, shortly after the accession of Henry II.

LAYAMON'S BRUT.-In this French form the story drifted through England, and at last falling into the hands of an English priest in Worcestershire, he resolved to tell it in English verse to his countrymen, and doing so became the